Seoul (CA) – Samsung said it has begun producing previously announced SSDs with 256 GB storage capacity. The new drives are also substantially faster than Samsung’s previous SSDs.

The 256 GB drives in production at this time are unlikely to hit retail, but will go to system vendors instead. Samsung declined to comment on the pricing of these new drives - which would be interesting to know since we know that Intel charges $595 for its 80 GB models and some PC vendors resell those drives for at least $700.

What we know, however, is that these drives are selling to PC vendors for less than $1000, which could translate into a significant bargain and may put pressure on firms such as Intel, which are currently using the profitable SSD segment, to pay for the losses the low-capacity flash business generates.

That price tag is even more noteworthy, if Samsung’s claimed performance data are realistic. So far, Samsung SSD drives have not really been known to be among the faster products and data transfer rates of less than 100 MB/s were topped by at least one hard drive. Samsung says that the 256 GB SSD is more than twice as fast as the 64 GB and 128 GB versions, combining sequential read rates of 220MB/s (megabytes per second) with sequential write rates of 200MB/s.

Samsung claims that the performance is enough to store 25 high-definition movies in just 21 minutes and launches applications 10 times faster than the fastest 7200rpm notebook HDD. The power consumption of the drive is rated at 1.1 watts.

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