Introduction

The word is out and every enthusiast dreams of the day they get to install a shiny new solidstate drive into their notebook or desktop. We have all seen the videos of a pair of notebooks booting into Windows; the solid state drive boots like it is coming out of hibernation and the platter drive, well, you know how that goes. Just as impressive are the claims of 30% more battery life for those on the go.

In our recent reviews, TweakTown has documented just how quickly the technology has come down from the clouds and landed right in the laps of enthusiasts. For users, the only thing that has held back wide spread adoption of solid state drives has been the enormous costs associated with the innovative technology.

In February, Samsung announced they would begin ramping up production of 64GB drives and the fruits of their effort are starting to pay dividends. It is now possible to purchase a 64GB solid state drive that uses lower cost Multi-Level Cell (MLC) for less than 400 U.S. Dollars. This week Samsung made a similar announcement committing to aggressively raise the production of 128GB drives with 256GB production increasing later in the year.

Samsung is aggressively expanding its SSD market offerings. It introduced a 64GB SSD in the second half of 2007, and plans to begin producing a 256GB at the end of this year. Samsung's mass production of 128GB SSDs helps it to maintain its position as the leading producer of SSDs in the world, with capacities ranging from 32GB to the highest available today.

Samsung expects sales of SSD units to increase 800 percent between now and 2010, keeping SSDs on pace to be the largest growth segment in the NAND flash market over the next few years.

The above statement was taken straight from Samsung's latest press release and if history repeats itself, we should start to see 128GB drives start to drop a significant amount within three months. The second paragraph shown from the press release shows that Samsung expects users to quickly take notice.

Reading between the lines, Samsung is saying that they are ready to make a large push with their NAND flash memory and customers will adopt it at a significant rate. Even ten years ago customers were not paying ten Dollars per Gigabyte of storage, and Samsung knows that an 800% increase is not possible at even half that price.