Samsung Electronics, Korea’s electronics behemoth, said Wednesday it recently started supplying a new solid state drive featuring faster read and write performance to global manufacturers of ultrabooks ― ultra-thin and ultra-light laptops.

The new SSD, named SM951-NVMe, with its thickness and weight measuring at 3.73 millimeters and 7 grams, allows laptop manufacturers to adopt a slimmer design in their products, according to Samsung.

The storage product also boasts read and write speeds of 2,260 megabytes per second and 1,600 megabytes per second, respectively, which are four and three times faster than those of the current 2.5-inch SSD widely used in ultra PCs.

“Our new NVMe SSD will allow for faster, ultra-slim notebook PCs with extended battery use, while accelerating the adoption of NVMe SSDs within the consumer marketplace,” said Baek Jee-ho, senior vice president of Samsung’s memory marketing division.

Samsung did not elaborate on laptops featuring the new SSD model, but Apple is said to be one its major customers that has deployed the new storage product in the latest MacBooks.

The M.2 NVMe SSD comes in storage capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.

The company said it would roll out large capacity NVMe SSD lineups featuring the 3-D vertical NAND technology, which stack up cells vertically, aiming to continue to take the lead in the SSD market.

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)