Samsung has just begun mass producing their new 256GB solid state drives (SSD). These are pretty much the largest SSDs currently available for laptops today.

For those of you not familiar with what an SSD is – A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. A SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface, thus easily replacing it in most applications. SSD has no moving parts, so no noise either!

Not only has Samsung created their largest SSD, but also their fastest. These new 256GB drives should offer performance that doubles their previous 64GB and 128GB variants. The sequential read rates are 220 megabytes per second with a write speed of 200MBps. This is pretty good and closes the performance gap between read and write operations.

These drives will perform exceptionally well when moving around large multimedia files (such as movies). According to Samsung, this new drive can have 25 high definition movies transferred in just 21 minutes, whereas a hard disk drive (7200RPM), would take about 70 minutes.

This thing only comsumes around 1.1 watts of power. Which is about 50% consumption of comparable hard disk drives. It will also mean smaller, more lightweight laptops.

The price? That we still don’t know yet.