Wow, I bet most of us didnt think the industry would catch up so soon, however PQI have managed to pump out a 2.5" solid-state hard disk with 256GB capacity; thats bang smack in the same league as the biggest of current mechanical notebook drives on the market.

Apparently this drive is also pretty damn quick, being able to dish out transfer speeds of around 60MB/sec. The only inevitable downside will be the pricetag, there's nothing official on that yet but it's not hard to believe it'll end up retailing in excess of $1k USD.

More info at the Dailytech.

Taipei, Taiwan ~ Power Quotient International Co., Ltd. (PQI) officially announced high speed 226X Industrial CF Turbo+ card, 256GB SSD Turbo+, 32GB PCI-E SSD and 1.8" 32GB ZIF - SSD storage mediums. The high speed 226X Industrial CF card Turbo+ is available with a maximum capacity of 16GB and a transfer rate of 38MB/sec.

Bob Chu, PQI DiskOnModule Manager states, with growing popularity of flash drive hard drive due to SSD's shock proof, high stability and low power consumption properties, SSDs have made it's debut in some of the world's renown PCs replacing traditional hard drives. Apart from the advantages described, SSDs also have longer average data storage time of 10 years and faster seek times compare to traditional hard drive read / write heads. PQI expects SSD to become the hard drive of the future and in 2008, SSD may replace up to 30% of traditional hard drive market.