The Korean semiconductor giant says that it will begin mass-producing 1.8" and 2.5" Solid-state drives (SSDs) for use by the mobile-computing industry. With the scale at which Samsung claim they're producing these parts, they hope to sell the parts at very competitive prices. This indicates a full-on reach of the SSD into consumer strata and of SSD becomming mainstream.

The Multi-Level Cell (MLC) drives slated for production feature 70 MB/s of write and 90 MB/s of read speeds, that's below what a single level cell (SLC) drive can offer, read speeds of 130 MB/s, an important specification to look out for when in the market for an SSD.

Samsung claims that the 128 GB SSD, which is built from 64 MLC NAND flash memory chips of 16 Gb (2 GB) each, is energy efficient at 0.2 W in standby mode and 0.5 W in active mode. Samsung claims the drive's expected life to be over 20 times that of conventional drives....80~100 years if a conventional drive lasts 5 years.