On Monday, at the annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan, Samsung Electronics announced the development of its new solid state drive (SSD).

The SSD is around 2.5-inches long and only 9.5-mm thick; according to the company, it is the world’s smallest drive in its class. Size is definitely not the only thing that sets this product apart: it is said to be 2.4 times faster than any traditional hard drive and the amount of data it can read per second goes up to 200 megabytes.

Just like the soon-to-be-released Intel SSDs, Samsung's drive uses the multi-level cell (MLC) technology as well as a high-speed Serial ATA II interface.

As there are no moving parts in the SSD, the risk for it to fail due to mechanical problems is brought to a minimum; hard disk drives’ mechanical delays are also significantly reduced.

The company said it would begin production later on this year.    

It seems that 2008 is turning out to be quite a busy year for Samsung: at the end of April, the company launched its new line of desktop monitors, called "Touch Of Color" (TOC). The TOC monitors come with multi screen functionality; users can thus divide the screen into several different sessions, depending on the nature of the work that is to be done.