Samsung Shows off 256GB SSD

By Greg McNevin

May 28, 2008: The future of solid state storage drives (SSDs) has taken a leap forward today, with Samsung showing off a new prototype 256GB high-speed drive in Taipei.

Designed as a drop-in replacement for traditional notebook hard drives, the SSD is not only one of the largest of its kind expected to appear on the market in the near future, but it is also one of the fastest at 200MB per second read and 160MB per second sequential write speed.

This makes it roughly twice as fast as typical magnetic hard drives, and now that capacity is more comparable to magnetic HDDs the popularity of the technology will no doubt surge.

However, that said, SSDs are still hideously expensive when compared to magnet HDDs, so it will still be a while before they start appearing in notebooks en masse.

Samsung says the new drive offers a mean time between failures of one million hours, and draws a mere 0.9 watts in active mode.

Samsung expects to begin mass production of the new drive by the end of 2008.

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