Samsung's mini-card SSDs are up to 80 percent smaller than SSDs found in most laptops today, the company said. The small drives weigh between 7.5 grams (0.17 pounds) and 8.5 grams, lower than the 75 grams to 85 grams that 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch SSDs weigh.

The small SSDs are suitable for netbooks, which are thin and light laptops designed for basic computing tasks like Web surfing and word processing. The SSDs could significantly reduce the weight and power consumption of netbooks.

The drives could easily attach to the motherboard and don't need to be plugged special slots, said Brian Beard, product marketing manager at Samsung. They consume about 0.3 watts of power, compared to an average of about 1.1 watts for 2.5-inch SSDs.

One caveat is that the new drives come with lower storage capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. The larger SSDs offer larger storage of up to 256GB. Samsung didn't talk about pricing for the SSDs.