The South Korean electronics maker, Samsung, said that it has begun mass producing 64 GB solid state drives (SSDs) with its new SATA II interface.

The 64GB SSD consists of 64 eight Gigabit (Gb) single-level cell flash memory chips. Use of 51nm process technology permits fabrication of much smaller components, with each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair.

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.

According to Samsung, the SATA II SSD offers better performances compared with SATA I drives. For example, it is able to read data at 100 megabytes per second and write it at 80 megabytes per second, which means that it is up to 60 percent faster than SATA I drives and two to five times faster than conventional hard disk drives (HDDs).

Samsung explained that the new drive consumes nearly 75 percent less power than typical HDDs (1.45 watts compared to 2.1 watts). In addition, it offers better shock resistance, being able to resist up to 1500 Gs of shock in a half millisecond. By comparison, a typical HDD has a shock resistance rating of 300 Gs in 2 milliseconds.

Samsung didn’t unveil the price of its 64 GB SATA II SSD, but the drive, which began shipping earlier this month, will be available as an option in select Dell and Alienware notebooks.