Samsung plans 256 GB SSD in 2009

Samsung appears to be wasting no time in the heating up Solid State Disk market. The company indicates plans to double capacity of SSD flash drives on an annual basis and since they have 128 GB samples on the way to vendors this year, that means we'll see 256 GB drives in 2009. Cost continues to be the primary limitation, but my hope is that SSD sales will drive prices down. I'll be keeping an eye on the Lenovo X300 sales figures since there's a 64 GB Samsung SSD drive in every unit.

Another factor to help drop prices: Samsung indicates that the industry will make a move by year-end to multilevel cell SSDs; current technology uses single level cells which cost more. I still don't expect SSDs to be competitively priced for some time when compared to traditional storage on cost-per-GB basis, but the price gap continues to slowly narrow. Capacity keeps trending up as well, but I gather that we'll see traditional storage for several years to come.