Samsung has launched its new PM830 series of solid state drives today which are the first SATA-III 6Gb/s drives from the company.

They are 2.5-inch sized drives and use 20nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory with a toggle DDR interface and AES 256-bit encryption.

Samsung promises read and write rates of up to 500MB/sec and 350MB/sec respectively. Capacities on offer in the series are 128GB, 256GB and 512GB.

Samsung's new line up of advanced SSDs will raise the performance bar to the next level for ultra-slim notebooks and tablets and accelerate growth of the market for high-performance SSDs," said Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics. "The industry is expected to quickly embrace SATA 6Gb/s-based SSDs, which also will help increase market interest in 256GB and higher densities significantly.

Sample production on the PM830 series SSDs began in May and volume production was initiated earlier this month.