"Samsung 256GB SSD with significantly higher performance is now in mass production. The hard drive is still the most popular choice for large amounts of storage on most consumer desktop and notebook computers. The capacity and performance of traditional HDDs is continually improving. On the other side of the ring are SSDs offering more performance at the cost of reduced capacity and significantly higher price.

While reducing the price of an SSD and increasing storage capacity is one way to fuel the migration from HDDs to the SSD, another way is to improve SSD performance to the point that the performance better justifies the price. Samsung has announced that it is now producing 256GB SSDs that offer significantly improved performance compared to previous generation SSDs aimed at the consumer market.

Samsung says that the SSD offers sequential read rates of 220MB/s with sequential write rates of 200MB/s. The SSD can also erase data at 100GBs per minute allowing for faster rewrites.

Samsung's Jim Elliott, VP of memory marketing said in a statement, "While SSD’s have always been touted for their performance, Samsung is turning the storage industry upside down now with an SSD that delivers truly disruptive performance. Getting our exceptionally high performing 256GB SSD in a notebook is analogous to having a 15,000rpm drive, without all of its size, noise, power and heating drawbacks."

Samsung says that the performance increase for the multi-level cell SSD comes courtesy of a new, optimized single platform design including a chip controller, NAND flash, and special drive firmware all developed by Samsung. The drive is energy efficient as well consuming only 1.1 watts of power.

Pricing and availability for the new SSDs are unknown at this time."