WOW! Coming soon… a 256GB 200MB/s SSD

Samsung is coming out with a 256GB solid-state drive that is billed as the world’s fastest and largest SSD. How soon? Gizmodo says mass production will begin by the end of this year! This is great news.

For the uninitiated, this ZDNet article explains why SSD is something we should all be excited about. SSDs do not have moving parts, like the conventional hard disks. This translates to faster reads, lower power consumption, thinner profile, and most noticeably, no sound.

So why is it that I still don’t own one? Because of the cost. A 64GB SSD upgrade (on the Apple Macbook Air) costs upwards of $1000! While I am selectively cheap, I have happily paid early-adopter prices for many gadgets in the past – bought the first generation iPod, one of the first hand-held GPS devices, an eBook reader. The SSD is just too expensive. And turns out it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. This Computerworld matchup shows that SSD drives are only marginally better than HDD ones, and only for certain types of use cases.

This much-awaited announcement from Samsung changes the equation. The prices of SSD drives will fall significantly and reads will be twice as fast making them more compelling. Really exciting. What will be even more exciting is to see how the world of desktop software takes advantage of this technology and what types of new, innovative apps it produces.