With the 64GB SSD (solid state drive) option in the MacBook Air costing $1000 to upgrade to, and with a 256GB drive four times the size of the now puny 64GB option, the price could easily be anywhere between $1000 and $4000 – more than most notebooks on the market today.

Of course, as volumes ramp up, prices will come down, and eventually the 256GB hard drive will be mass market affordable, just as 250GB 2.5-inch mechanical hard drives are today – but it’ll still take some time, at least a year or two if not more, by which time Samsung will surely have popped 1TB SSDs out of the oven, if not larger still.

But all that’s in the future, and today the spotlight rests firmly on the stunning technological achievement of a 2.5-inch 256GB SSD drive, one connecting via a SATA II interface, with a sequential read speed of 200 MB/s (megabytes per second) and a sequential write speed of 160 MB/s.

Samsung says that makes the new drive around 2.4 times faster than a ‘typical HDD’, and if you ask me, that’s pretty damn good! Interestingly Samsung also says that this development “effectively eliminates density as a barrier to SSD adoption in the consumer space” – but it’s a pity the unknown and inevitably high price will still remain a pretty high barrier to that aforementioned consumer adoption, at least in the short term.

Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. said that: "With development of the 256GB SSD, the notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution. This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage.”

The drive is expected to have an MTBF (a mean time between failure) of million hours, with low power consumption a bonus too at only 0.9 watts in active mode, suggesting that sleep mode will be considerably less.

In addition, the drive uses “multi level cell” (MLC) storage technology to squeeze so many gigabytes into the same space that once only fit 64GB, with Samsung boasting that its new MLC technology is essentially as fast as older single level cell (SLC) technology – a breakthrough, as MLCs were once much slower.

So, what other technological feats does the 256GB SSD bring to the storage table, when will it come to market and what does it look like? Please read on to page 2!

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Another additional feature is ‘sophisticated data encryption’ which means the drive can’t just be read if stolen and placed into another computer, something that will make corporate IT people very happy.

The drive will go into mass production by the end of the year, although “customer samples” will be available by September. Stunningly, Samsung will squeeze the 256GB technology into a 1.8-inch enclosure by the end of the year too – imagine one of those in your iPhone or iPod!

iSuppli supplied some figures to Samsung suggesting the SSD market will grow by 124% between now and 2012, while sales are expected to increase by an addition 35% next year over what it previously projected for 2009, 51% more in 2010 and 89% more in 2011, “and continue to show dramatic increases in subsequent years.”

The 256GB SSD is only 9.5millimeters (mm) thick, and measures 100.3x69.85 mm. As we said, no pricing yet.

Still, I’ll bet that Steve Jobs gets a 1.8-inch model for Christmas from Samsung to put into his his MacBook Air, seeing that Apple buys so much memory for iPods and iPhones from Samsung and is one of Samsung’s very best customers.

If only I was on their Christmas list to get one, too!

See a photo here.