Today Samsung announced that its 2.5-inch SATA 64GB SSD is shipping and Dell and Alienware are already integrating these drives in their notebooks.

“The greater reliability and higher performance of solid state drives makes them a highly viable alternative to hard drives in corporate and high-end consumer notebooks, said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “We're delighted that Dell and Alienware have chosen the Samsung 64GB SSD for their latest generation of leading-edge notebooks.”

For example, Alienware will provide a 128GB SSD configuration, by offering dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 array available on the Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook.  The other possible setup offers a single 64GB SSD combined with a large capacity 200GB 7200RPM drive.

 “After previously being first to market with a dual 32GB RAID 0 SSD configuration, Alienware has achieved another milestone in mobile storage by being the first to deliver a dual 64GB SSD RAID 0 configuration and the first to combine a single 64GB SSD with a second larger capacity hard drive,” said Bryan de Zayas, Associate Director of Product Marketing at Alienware. “This gives Alienware notebook users unprecedented data access and storage flexibility and allows them to take advantage of rapid performance, rugged reliability and maximum power efficiency all at once.” 

Dell will integrate Samsung’s SSDs in its XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook. Later this year, SSDs will be available on other XPS systems, as well on Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations.

SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. SSD can also improve battery life by up to 20 percent in notebooks.

Although, with no moving parts, the flash-based SSD starts working almost immediately to achieve far better access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive. For example, in notebook computers, data moves to and from an SSD more than 100 times faster than data moving to and from a hard disk.

Also SSDs are noise-free and are less susceptible to shocks and vibrations that can be challenging to traditional disk drives.