Corsair is set to release an ultra-fast 256GB solid state drive, according to a Tuesday HotHardWare report. The move would effectively double the company’s current number of SSD offerings and would share Samsung technology. The new SSD has a new controller, however, and and integrated 64MB of cache that improves performance significantly. When the new SSD arrives in stores, it is likely to be called P256, and will sport a SATA 3.0Gbps interface and be housed in a heavy-duty aluminum enclosure. Double-stacked MLC flash memory chips from Samsung are used in the drive. According to some benchmark testing from HotHardWare, the drive has average read speeds of just over 200Mbps, while average write speed performance was 169.1Mbps at 0.1ms random access times and burst speeds as high as 248.2Mbps.

While no release date has been given, the Corsair P256 is expected to cost $749.

Update on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 6:54PM by Jon Arnason

Corsair this afternoon said it had started shipping the P256, its fastest and also most capacious solid-state drive. The 2.5-inch SATA II drive holds its namesake 256GB thanks to multi-level cell storage but has a fast Samsung  controller that lets it read data at 220MB per second and writes at an equally quick 200MB per second. A 128MB cache and native command queuing further add to the practical speed.