Samsung Electronics Co, the world’s largest computer chip maker, said Monday it has developed a new solid-state drive which is expected to replace hard disk drives in laptop computers.
Samsung said its 256-gigabyte solid state drive (SSD) for data storage is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives. The company plans to begin production of SSDs this year.
The new SSD “represents a bold step in the shift to notebooks with significantly improved performance and larger storage capacities,” the company said in a statement.
Samsung described the new SSD, 2.5 inches long and 9.5 millimeters thick, as the world’s smallest of its kind. It can read up to 200 megabytes of data per second.
It said, citing market research agency iSuppli, that 35 percent of notebook computers would use the SSD by 2012.