Samsung has announced it has officially started mass producing 256GB solid-state drives (SSDs) for use in desktop PCs and notebooks.

Mass producing the 2.5-inch 256GB SSDs will give Samsung a step-up on the competition, especially as more companies begin to manufacture SSDs for the notebook market.  Manufacturers have created 2.5" HDDs up to 1TB in size, though smaller storage capacities remain more popular -- and SSDs are typically too expensive for mass adoption... yet.

Samsung already offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs in notebooks.

The new SSDs have a sequential read rate of 220 megabytes per second, and write rates of 200MBps.  It can transfer 25 high-definition moves in only 21 minutes, while a regular 7,200rpm HDD takes around 70 minutes.

"This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 and 70 percent for other SSDs," according to Samsung.

"Samsung is turning the storage industry upside down now with an SSD that delivers truly disruptive performance," said Jim Elliott, Samsung Memory Marketing Vice President.  "Getting our exceptionally high performing 256GB SSD in a notebook is analogous to having a 15,000rpm drive, without all of its size, noise, power and heating drawbacks."

The Korean company did not publicly disclose random write performance speeds for the new SSDs.  SSDs are faster than HDDs, especially when reading data, but random write speeds remain unimpressive if compared to HDDs.

Even though SSDs typically cost more than HDDs when comparing price per gigabyte, the lack of moving parts, faster operating speeds, higher reliability, and lower power consumption means SSDs will likely be the storage choice in the future.

Samsung, Seagate, SanDisk and other manufacturers continue to take a great interest in SSDs, as they expect price drops will help convince consumers to adopt the technology.