We received a tip last night, Nov. 19, that Samsung has started mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives for use in notebooks and desktop PCs. That would make them the highest-capacity drives yet for portable PCs.

According to Samsung, the 256GB SSD news notes include:
--Double the general performance rate of Samsung's standard 64GB and 128GB SSDs
--Narrowed read/write gap: 10 percent, compared with 20 to 70 percent for other SSDs
--Faster erase cycles, allowing the entire drive to be rewritten much faster when needed
--High energy efficiency: 1.1 watts versus 2 watts or more for a comparable spinning-disk hard drive
--Up to 40 minutes of extended operation using a single charge
--Expedited data transfer for large multimedia files (can store 25 high-definition movies in 21 minutes, compared with 70 minutes for a comparable HDD)

Curiously, Samsung did not claim anything involving random write performance. SSDs are well known for being much faster than HDDs on random reads, but have always been slower at random writes.

Samsung said the 256GB SSD's high performance can be attributed to an optimized single-platform design consisting of a chip controller, NAND flash and special drive firmware.

Looks like the SSD wars involving Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk are really starting to heat up. Expect to see 512GB SSDs in short order.