Soon your notebook will feature SSD instead of a classic hard drive. At least the South Korean electronics maker, Samsung, believes so.

Today, Samsung announced that it has begun mass producing 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) at 64GB (gigabytes) - 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.

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.

As a result, notebooks equipped with a SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in less than a minute.

Notebooks based on SSDs are getting more and more attractive for consumers and PC makers. Earlier this month, at the Computex Taipei 2007, First International Computer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc. showed prototype of ultra portables laptops.

At the same technical show SanDisk extended its line of solid state drive (SSD) products with the introduction of a 64-gigabyte (GB) SSD aimed at both enterprise users and early adopter consumers such as gamers.

Other digital consumer products such as camcorders, PDAs and printers can now be equipped with SSDs ranging from 4GB to 64GB.