Samsung Electronics is now mass-producing the industry’s first 1.8-inch solid state drives at a whopping 64 gigabytes, making the high-density flash-memory-based drives suitable for widespread ultra-portable laptop use. Samsung’s 64-gigabyte SSD consists of 64 eight-gigabit single-level cell flash memory chips, Samsung says. The company uses a 51nm process technology, which permits fabrication of tiny components, with each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair. However, all that minuscule circuitry comes at a price.

Prices are expected to decrease as adoption rises, and Samsung is working to develop the market for its drives in a variety of new mediums, including digital consumer products such as camcorders, PDAs and printers.

Samsung predicts that over the next three years, larger 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SSDs will also become widely used in standard notebooks and desktop PCs.