Samsung on Friday followed past promises and began mass production of the Flash SSD SATA II, its highest-performance solid-state drive to date. The new 1.8-inch, 64GB disk has both the added potential bandwidth of the Serial ATA II interface as well as much faster actual speed than its SATA I predecessor: at 100MB per second in reading data and 80MB per second for writes, the drive is about 60 percent faster than the outgoing drive. The speed also places the new Flash SSD ahead of many conventional drives in raw transfer speed rather than just the low latency advantage common to most SSD storage.

The drive is also claimed to be significantly more power-efficient than conventional, rotating 1.8-inch equivalents and consumes less than 1.5 watts while active versus the 2 watts of the older, less shock-proof technology.

Samsung has also named its earliest customers for the advanced drive and says that both Dell and its gaming label Alienware will be the first to provide the drive as an option "soon," most likely replacing existing 64GB options in higher-end desktops and notebooks. The SATA II connection works with most standard SATA I or II ports but makes the drive unusable for the MacBook Air and some other ultraportables, which rely on a Parallel ATA connector.