Samsung today announced that it has begun mass producing 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) at 64GB - the highest density SSD available today for mobile computing applications. "We see sharply increasing interest in SSDs among OEMs worldwide amid a growing push to launch premium SSD-based notebooks, particularly in the ultra-mobile category," said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. In addition, SSD can also improve battery life in notebooks.

Samsung's 64GB SSD consists of 64 eight Gigabit (Gb) single-level cell flash memory chips. The Korean company used the 51nm process technology, meaning that each chip has circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair.

Samsung has already introduced 32GB SSDs into ultra-mobile personal computers (UMPCs).Other digital consumer products such as camcorders, PDAs and printers can also be equipped with SSDs.

Samsung expects that sales of SSD units will increase at a 270 percent pace industry-wide between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash industry.