Samsung announces 256GB SSD

Posted at: 4:00am 27th May 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

New super-fast SSD will be 2.4x the speed of a standard hard drive, claims Samsung

Solid state disks may well be the way of the future, but when Samsung’s 64GB SSD costs a heart-stopping £538.36 inc VAT, it’s fair to say that we’re going to be clinging on to our hard drives for a while yet. However, that hasn’t deterred SSD king Samsung from announcing a brand new 256GB SSD, which boasts some incredible read and write speeds.

According to Samsung, the 256GB SSD is 2.4 times faster than a typical hard drive. The company quotes a sequential read speed of 200MB/sec, and a sequential write speed of 160MB/sec, both of which are significantly quicker than the respective 120MB/sec and 100MB/sec speeds of the company’s 64GB drive.

Despite the high data transfer speeds, however, Samsung claims that the new drive will only consume 0.9W when active and it’s also only 9.5mm thick. The new drives will come equipped with a S-ATA II interface, and Samsung claims that samples will be shipping in September this year, with mass production starting by the end of the year. A 1.8in version of the drive is also planned for smaller laptops.

Given the high price of even a 64GB SSD at the moment, the new drives aren’t likely to be cheap, but Samsung says that the 256GB capacity will be a move towards 'effectively eliminating density as a barrier to SSD adoption.’ Samsung Semiconductor’s director of memory marketing, Gerd Schauss, made a bold comparison between the new drive and ‘the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players.’

The capacity of SSDs has rocketed in recent years, but the prices of high-capacity drives are still much higher than those of comparatively sized hard drives. How long will it be until SSDs become standard and we no longer need hard drives, if ever? Let us know your thoughts.