Samsung announced a new multi-level cell flash-based 128 GB solid state drive (SSD). The SSD will be launched this year in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch versions for notebook and desktop PCs. The new drive offers a data writing speed of 70 megabytes per second (MB/s), the industry’s highest for MLC-based SSDs, says Samsung. The reading speed is at 100MB/s. Featuring a 3.0 gigabit-per-second SATA II interface, it also has low power consumption level of 0.5W in active mode. Samsung says it will start the production in the first half of 2008.

In its release, Samsung shows a  research from Web-Feet which says the SSD market is expected to reaches to US$ 6.6 billion by 2010, a compound annual growth rate of over 120 percent.