X

Samsung develops 256GB solid state drive

Company has created one of the largest-capacity and fastest solid state drives to date. Commercial production is set to begin by year's end.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers

Samsung has developed one of the largest-capacity and highest-speed solid state drives to date.

Samsung 256GB solid state drive
Samsung 256GB solid state drive Samsung

CNET site ZDNet Korea reports that Samsung announced the development of a 2.5-inch, 256GB solid state drive (SSD) at the fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan.

Typical solid state drives shipping in notebook PCs today have a storage capacity of 64GB.

With a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second and sequential write speed of 160MBps, Samsung is claiming some of the fastest SSD data transfer rates to date.

Like upcoming Intel SSDs, Samsung's drive will use multi-level cell (MLC) technology and a high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) II interface. Later this year, Intel is planning to announce high-capacity SSDs, which select PC vendors are expected to adopt in forthcoming notebook PCs based on the Centrino 2 "Montevina" mobile processor.

Samsung is slated to begin commercial production of the SSD by year's end, with customer samples available in September. A 1.8-inch version of the 256GB SSD is expected to be available in the fourth quarter, ZDNet Korea reported.

SSDs have no moving parts, which means they avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of hard disk drives.