Samsung is now cranking out the 256GB solid state drives (SSD). When the company ambitiously proclaimed in late May of this year it would deliver such a beast in quantity by the end of this year, most of us were a bit skeptical about the company's braggadocio. But now it's here, joining Micron and Toshiba in the 256GB SSD club. It's blazing fast, too, up there with the quickest conventional spinning hard drives on the market.

How fast? Think of it this way: if you put this 2.5-inch sucker in your notebook, it'll open your apps ten times faster than a conventional 7200rpm notebook drive. Whoa. For the techie crowd, that's a blazing 220MB/sec, twice as fast as any solid-state hard drive that came before it. Unlike those old-timey spinning drives, this one does its fleet magic while staying cool and silent. Disruptive performance, indeed.

The big question remains: What's the price, Samsung? Lots of tech-talk excitement fizzles when you see that enormous price tag attached. To give you an idea, an SSD half the size of this one typically adds $500 to the cost of a laptop. So even if this new 256-gig drive is exorbitantly expensive ($1000 more?) out of the gate, it shows you what will be affordable and maybe commonplace, a year from now. These SSDs are excellent, and the cheaper, bigger and faster, the better. We can't wait.

Via Businesswire