Samsung announced today volume production of SSDs (solid state drives) that support the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 interface. The new PM830 SSDs are available at up to 512 gigabyte (GB) densities. Samsung's new high-speed SSDs are suited for use in OEM notebooks and tablets. Sample production of the SATA 6Gb/s 512GB SSDs began in May, with volume production initiated earlier this month. The new drives are expected to replace SATA 3Gb/s-based SSDs by year-end.

The 512GB SSD utilizes Samsung's most advanced 20 nanometer (nm) class 32Gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory chip incorporating the toggle DDR interface. A proprietary NAND controller facilitates high performance levels that take full advantage of the toggle DDR architecture and the SATA 6Gb/s interface. The new SSD doubles the performance of a SATA 3Gb/s drive, with sequential read speeds of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speeds of 350MB/s.

The drive also features high level of security by using an AES 256-bit encryption algorithm to protect personal or corporate data from unauthorized access.

Samsung's SATA 6Gb/s SSDs are available in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB densities and are targeted for use in premium OEM notebooks, and tablets. A consumer version of the drive will also released by Samsung soon.

According to market research firm IDC, the global outlook for client-side SSDs is expected to grow ten-fold from 11 million units in 2011 to 100 million units in 2015. Moreover, the use of NAND in 256GB SSDs is forecast to more than double from 19 percent of all NAND used in SSDs in 2011 to 42 percent in 2015. Further, demand for 512GB SSDs is expected to grow from a 0.3 percent portion in 2011 to eight percent in 2015.