Taipei (Taiwan) – Samsung claims to have developed the world’s fastest solid state disk (SSD) drive, offering a blazing 200 MB/s data read rate – about the performance of fastest hard drives money can buy today.

The company announced the new drive earlier today at the Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei and told attendees that it will be charging ahead with its SSD drive technology and put this new 256 GB model in 1.8” and 2.5” version into mass production by year-end.  

The drive is based on the company’s multi-level cell (MLC) and will be equipped with a SATA II interface. Samsung promises that the 2.5” version, which is just 9.5 mm thick, will hit data read rates of 200 MB/s and sequential read rates of 160 MB/s. WD’s 300 GB Velociraptor 3.5” hard drive, considered the fastest traditional hard drive on the market today, was benchmarked by major hardware review sites and achieved data read and write rates of just over 100 MB/s.

The currently fastest SSDs on the market are typically hitting read transfer rates of 130 MB/s and write transfer rates of 100 MB/s.

While Samsung’s SSD performance numbers look fantastic, it is unclear how expensive this drive will be. 256 GB 2.5” SSDs currently cost somewhere in the range of $7000, while WD’s Velociraptor hard drive sells for $300. However, Samsung claims that the 256 GB “will mark the largest capacity SSD from the global market leader in SSD sales, effectively eliminating density as a barrier to SSD adoption in the consumer space.”

Samsung did not say how much the 256 GB drive and a smaller 128 GB sister model could cost, but we have little hope that these numbers will come in below $1000.