The SSD bandwagon is getting more and more crowded as time goes by and the category begins to mature. Many SSD makers are actively targeting the business and enterprise category for their wares where the benefits of the SSD and higher price make more sense. Small and low cost SSDs are the more popular options in the consumer space where netbooks are coming on strong.

Samsung has announced new enterprise SSDs that are designed to offer low power consumption and high IOPS rates. Samsung announced this week that it is now in mass production with a pair of SSDs in odd capacities. The SSDs are being offered in 25GB and 50GB flavors.

Samsung says that the SSDs are optimized for server applications like video on demand, web serving, and on-line transaction processing. The parts were designed specifically for the enterprise market and the maker claims that the new SLC SSDs offer twice the random write performance of its standard 32GB and 64GB SLC SSDs.

Samsung was also out to save enterprise users money on cooling costs and power for high-density server rooms. The new SSDs need only 1.25 watts of power in active mode and 0.3 watts in idle. That is a 25% power savings when compares to a typical 2.5-inch 15,000 rpm SAS HDD.

Samsung Director of Memory Marketing Gerd Schauss said in a statement, "The Samsung SSDs give IT managers the best in high-performance, high-endurance storage for servers, with markedly less energy consumption. Now being considered by virtually all major PC OEMs, the proven technology of enterprise SSDs provides a compelling combination of price, performance and longevity for many medium-sized businesses as well as large corporations."

Samsung's new 25GB and 50GB SSDs provide 100 times the number of IOPS per watt than 15,000 rpm 2.5-inch SAS HDDs can deliver. The drives have a sequential data read speed of 100MB/s and a write speed of 80MB/s. The drives will be available worldwide this month. Samsung introduced other SSDs recently with significantly higher levels of performance.