Samsung announced yesterday that its three solid state disk (SSD) drives have been officially recognized by Microsoft Corporation as fully qualified Windows-compatible peripherals.

After thorough testing by its Windows Hardware Qualification Lab (WHQL), Microsoft has validated that Samsung SSDs meet all of the requirements for storage media in a Windows operating environment.

“Microsoft’s certification of Samsung’s SSDs provides designers with the added assurance of full compatibility in a demanding Windows environment, with our SSDs adding a strong dose of speed, reliability and power savings.” said Jon Kang, senior vice president of Technical Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor.

Samsung’s SSDs also markedly enhance system performance. The SSDs have a data read speed of 57MB/s and data write speed of 32MB/s, more than double the performance levels of a 1.8-inch HDD. Moreover, the SSDs provide a performance boost of up to 50 times that of a 1.8 HDD when servicing small, random data “read” requests. Such faster speeds shorten application program operating time as well as system boot time.

Samsung’s new solid state memory solutions also enable longer battery life. Their power usage rate in an operational mode is less than 0.5W and in sleep mode just 40mW, which extends battery usage up to 30 minutes.

With no moving parts, Samsung’s SSDs provide higher reliability with greater resistance against vibration, shock, extreme temperature, noise and heat emission.

Microsoft has certified a 32GB 1.8-inch sized Samsung SSD, a 32GB slim-type Samsung SSD (53.6×70.6×3.0mm) and a 16GB small-type SSD (56x48x3.8mm). The new sizes support the physical requirements of sub-notebook PCs.

The SSDs’ substantial size and weight advantages are expected to further encourage a steady adoption of SSDs into a number of PC applications, such as in ultra mobile PCs, “ruggedized” notebooks and special industrial applications.

The SSD technology is still at its beginnings and with a top capacity of just 32 GB, it cannot compete with standard notebook hard-disks which have capacities of up to 200 GB. Of course, there is a market niche that is willing to sacrifice storage capacity over speed, but this will always be a small percentage of the market.

The future will probably bring a hybrid solution for mobile data storage. Normal hard-drives with a certain amount of SSD memory could be a viable solution as they could store fast access data on the solid state memory and other non vital information on regular hard-disks.