Samsung has started volume production of a 256GB solid state drive (SSD). The company's most capacious SSD will also be its fastest, with promised read times of 220Mbit/s and write times of 200Mbit/s.

Erase times have also been improved to 100GB per minute, meaning that the drive can be completely wiped in under three minutes.

"SSDs have always been touted for their performance, but Samsung is turning the storage industry upside down with an SSD that delivers truly disruptive performance," said Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor.

"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."

Samsung claims that the drives are around three times faster than standard 7,200rpm platter disk drives, and around 10 times more efficient than a similar laptop drive.

The company attributes the speed increase to a redesigned chip controller, improved Nand Flash and better firmware.

The SSD is also more power efficient than a platter drive, consuming 1.1W of power compared to two or more for a traditional drive.