Samsung has pledged to put a 256GB laptop-friendly solid-state drive into mass-production by the end of the year.

Samsung's 256GB SSD: company's fastest, most capacious Flash drive yet

The South Korean giant said the SSD will be made available in 2.5in and 1.8in forms. The latter will undoubtedly please MacBook Air buffs looking for an SSD upgrade, assuming the drive's made available with a parallel ATA interface - right now, Samsung's touting 3Gb/s SATA as the interconnect.

Related stories

• If your SSD sucks, blame Vista, says SSD vendor
• Toshiba readies 400GB monster laptop HDD
• Samsung fires up 128GB SSD massive attack
• Hitachi second-gen terabyte hard drive tech
• Apple takes axe to MacBook Air SSD price
• Toshiba readies 'highest capacity' 1.8in SATA hard drive
• Intel SSD squeezes into sub-notebook sizes
• SanDisk makes sub-SSDs for sub-laptops
• Asus announces 10in, HDD-equipped Eee PC
• Intel to use Centrino 2 to promote solid-state drives
• Seagate lawsuit targets solid-state drive maker
• Toshiba reveals R500 sub-notebook with 128GB SSD
• World's slimmest 256GB SSD unveiled

What's the betting for a January 2009 Air update?

The drives are 9.5mm thick, which makes them a good choice for a fair few skinny laptops, not just Apple's.

Samsung also claimed the drive would be its fastest yet, delivering a sequential read-speed of 200MB/s and a sequential write-speed of 160MB/s. They'll incorporate data-encryption tech too, and consume just 0.9W when active - less than many a hard drive in idle mode.