The 256 GB Samsung PB22-J Solid State Drive (SSD) is not only attractive on the outside, but also attractive on the inside.
Please note that Samsung currently only ships its Solid State Drives to its notebook customers and that they are not currently available to consumers directly. With that being said, the PB22-J will start showing up more frequently as an optional upgrade, possibly from well known companies such as Alienware, Flybook and Lenovo according to quick research.
Starting on the outside, the PB22-J 256 GB SSD from Samsung sports a very attractive look with its Brushed aluminum finish and measures in at 100mm x 70mm x 9.5mm (standard 2.5-inch form factor). The looks show pride in engineering from Samsung, since you will not be able to see it once it is installed anyways.
One interesting, although not surprising aspect of this SSD is that Samsung has used all of its own chips. This 256 GB SDD consists of sixteen K9MDGZ8U5M-SCK0 Multi-Layer Cell (MLC) flash chips along with a 1 GB K4X1G323PD-8GC6 DDR cache chip. And to top that all off, the onboard SSD controller is also built by Samsung – a bold move, considered by some. For comparison, Intel uses a Promise made SSD controller and OCZ makes use of the popular JMicron controller chip.
If you are interested in seeing some benchmark performance numbers for the Samsung PB22-J 256 GB SSD you can find them located over at The Register Hardware site here. Judging by the results they were able to come up with, this SSD looks to be pretty hot – it is just too bad that they are not available to consumers directly, yet.
Also, since this drive is not currently available to the general public we were unable to obtain any solid pricing information as the cost of upgrading can be quite different among notebook manufacturers that choose to employ it.
Images: courtesy of TheRegister.co.uk, Samsung