Samsung, the rather large South Korean electronics behemoth, said it has begun large-scale production of the 256GB large solid state drive (SSD) it had announced end of May this year. The drive apparently offers twice the performance of Samsung's current 64GB and 128GB flash boxes and achieves sequential read/ write rates of 220 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 200MB/s, respectively.

The big drive is thus faster than Samsung originally stated a couple of months ago, when it claimed the drive would have a sequential read rate of 200MB/s and a write rite of 160MB/s. Power consumption, however, has risen from the 0.9 watts advertised in May to be 1.1 watts.

Samsung claims a discerning user can save 25 high definition movies with an average size of 10GB on the drive in 21 minutes, whereas a conventional hard disk drive rotating at 7,200rpm would need 70 minutes to store the same amount of date. However, storing 250 gigabytes of movies on a 256GB sized SSD or HDD wouldn't leave enough space for the current incarnation of Windows.

It ought to be soothing to know for the English Ministry of Defence, which has had to witness more than a few of its laptops being stolen this year, that the SSDs can be ordered with proprietary full disk encryption.

Prices have yet to be announced, but are sure to be reassuringly-expensive. X