Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest chipmaker, showcased its new solid state drive lineup Thursday, proclaiming the beginning of the terabyte era in the SSD market.

“After accelerating the growth of the SSD market with last year’s launch of entry-level, high-performance SSDs, we are introducing much faster SSDs with up to 1TB capacities, offering consumers a wider range of choices,” said Jun Young-hyun, executive vice president at Samsung’s memory sales and marketing department.

“Samsung continues to enhance its SSD brand image by delivering the industry’s highest quality solutions and continuously increasing its SSD market share by expanding the adoption of higher density SSDs especially in client PC segments.”

Competition in the SDD market, which is rapidly increasing its share of the overall memory market, is expected to heat up as memory firms roll out new technology. 

Micron Technology, an American memory manufacturer, earlier unveiled a 950GB SSD, called Crucial M500, in April.

“It is expected that the SSD market will reach a record high of $10 billion in sales this year, up 53 percent from $7 billion last year,” a Samsung official said.

Samsung’s new SSD 840 EVO offers up to 1TB memory storage, making use of the industry’s most compact 10 nanometer class 128Gb high-performance NAND flash memory.

In 2012, Samsung sold 2.5 million units of SSD 840, the previous model of the EVO, accounting for 20 percent of the entire market, according to the firm.

The EVO line-up is available in five capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB.

The 1TB SSD product is priced at $650.

“Samsung was already capable of producing one terabyte SDD in 2010, but the firm has had to wait for the right time to introduce the device due to cost efficiency issues,” said a director from the memory business department of Samsung who participated in the showcasing event.

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