Stepping up its efforts in the SSD arena, Samsung has unveiled what it claims is the first solid-state drive to use a Serial ATA II interface, giving the new 64GB 1.8 and 2.5-inch drives sequential write speeds of 100MB/sec and sequential reads of 120MB/sec.

The new drives combine a 50 nm-class, single-level-cell (SLC) 8Gb flash chip with a proprietary, high-speed SATA controller. It boasts a 3.0Gbps interface speed , said to be double the speed of its SATA I predecessor, yet requiring half as much power as the typical 1.9W consumed by notebook hard drives and only one-tenth the power consumed by enterprise-class 15,000rpm hard drives in servers.

The company is currently sampling the new SATA II SSDs and production examples should follow in early 2008. With the new, faster drives Samsung hopes to target the mobile market as well as the enterprise server market and other applications that demand high-speed data reading and writing.