SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS announced said has developed the world's fastest and largest-capacity 2.5-inch, SATA IImulti-level cell (MLC) based solid state drive (SSD), at 256 Gigabytes.

The 256GB SSD is also the thinnest drive on SATA II, running in at 9.5 millimetres (mm) thick and measuring just 100.3 x 69.85 mm. It boasts a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speed of 160MB/s, making it around 2.4 times faster than a bog-standard HDD.

Samsung 256GB SSD

“The notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution. This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage,” warbled Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

From advancements in its proprietary controller technology the MLC 256GB SSD is now comparable in speed to a SLC-based SSD, bragging the reliability of SLC (single level cell) SSDs too. Samsung claims a mean time between failures (MTBF) of one million hours, plus power consumption as low as 0.9 watts whilst in active mode.

The drive will also offer a solid data encryption process preventing data stored on the SSD from being accessed in an unauthorised way, even after the SSD is hijacked from the PC.

Samsung expects mass production of the 2.5-inch, 256GB SSD by year end. A 1.8-inch version of the 256GB SSD is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2008. µ