Samsung has released the world’s largest solid state drive (SSD) in the form of their new 256GB FlashSSD flagship drive.
For those not in the know about the SSD craze, basically these hard drives are giant collections of flash-based memory, offering no moving parts (physically very strong, don’t need to worry about dropping it killing it) as well as insanely fast Read and Write speeds because it’s well… solid-state memory.
This particular drive offers (marketing performance numbers):
- 200 MB/sec Read Speeds
- 160 MB/sec Write Speeds
For those that are new to SSDs and are thinking “what’s the big deal, my RAID/SCSI setup gets those performance numbers”, the thing about SSDs (and memory in general) is that these are not burst speeds, these are sustained, constant speeds and if that weren’t cool enough, the access times on SSDs (again, because they are memory) are infinitesimal usually around 0.1ms or so (instead of the 8-11ms you typically see in standard platter-based hard drives) making seeks and random read/write operations begin almost instantly instead of requiring a “seek” time upfront.
So now that you are drooling all over yourself, the one thing to remind you about is that SSDs are still “cutting edge” technologies, and unless you won the lottery, you won’t be decking out your next build anytime soon with one.
Samsung didn’t announce a price with the new 256GB model, but for comparison sake, Super Talent has a 128GB model for sale on Newegg and it is $3049. My guess is that this new drive will likely retail for $7000 or abouts that… so be sure to get me one when you pick up a couple.
Thanks Engadget!
