Samsung has announced at their fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, the development of one of the thinnest, highest speed and largest capacity solid state drives to date with 250GB of storage.

Most PCs and laptops today, including the new MacBook Air, have only 64GB Solid State Drives.

The 2.5-inch drive is based on NAND Flash memory and has a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s). It also has a fast sequential write speed of 160MB/s leaving Samsung claiming some of the fastest transfer rates for SSD data – 2.4 times faster than ‘a typical HDD’. Despite this performance increase, the drive still only consumes 0.9 Watts in active mode.

The drive is only 9.5mm think, making it the world’s thinnest SSD. A 25% improvement over the former leader.

Intel is also planning to announce high-capacity SSDs later this year which would provide some serious competition for Samsung. It has also been reported that Google has been testing Intel’s SSD technology for possible use in their expansive data centres.

Both companies will utilise multi-level cell (MLC) technology combined with a high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) II interface.

“With development of the 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,” said Jim Elliott, Samsung Semiconductor’s vice president of memory marketing.

Samsung is expected to begin production of the SSD by the end of the year. A 1.8-inch version of the drive is also expected to be available by then.

Photo credit: Gizmodo