Korean chaebol Samsung said it began mass production of its 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch solid state drives (SSDs) at capacity of 128GB. It has also started making 64GB versions of the drives.

Yet even though Samsung said the drives have attractive pricing, it didn't provide details.

On the technical side, the SSDs have a write speed of 700MB/s and read speed of 90MB/s - Samsung claimed the 128GB drive will last around 20 times longer than a conventional notebook PC hard drive.

Power consumption in standby mode amounts to 0.2 watts and active mode at 0.5 watts. The drives have a 3 gigabit per second interface.

The firm is bullish about SSDs, and reckons sales will increase by a whopping 800% between now and 2010. X