Tech Shout!

Samsung has started shipping a new 2.5-inch, 64GB solid-state drive (SSD), thereby attaining the distinction of becoming the very first company to ship a high capacity flash drive for notebooks in the US. The capacity is twice as that of the previous 32GB drives, giving owners the choice of installing much more software and also enjoying the benefit of the highly enhanced loading times and battery life of SSD. It also seems that the SSD consumes less power to optimize a notebook’s battery life.

Samsung kicked off the mass production of the drive in June, after announcing it earlier this year.

In addition, the new 64GB Samsung SSD is expected to produce minimal noise and should be shockproof, as per Samsung. The Serial ATA connection not only helps to maximize the bandwidth available to the drive, but also let the drive drop into almost any modern notebook to replace conventional rotating hard disks.

Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 and Dell’s XPS M1330 are the first notebooks to integrate the new drive. While the Area-51 m9750 can use two of the drives in a RAID stripe to form a continuous 128GB solid-state drive with extremely fast drive access; users can also pick one 64GB drive and back it up with a 200GB, 7200RPM traditional drive to speed up the OS while still providing the room for a large number of games. Dell’s 13.3-inch XPS M1330 can also replace the lone drive with Samsung’s 64GB model to speed up and reduce the weight of the already light 4-pound system.

Bryan de Zayas, Associate Director of Product Marketing at Alienware said, “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.” He added, “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.”

While Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 notebooks steps up by $1,100 with the addition of the 64GB drive, Dell hasn’t revealed the price of its XPS M1330 notebook after the bundling of the drive. Several other computer manufacturers are also in the works of using the storage in ultraportable systems.