Power Quotient International (PQI), a well-known supplier of memory modules, graphics cards and flash-based products, on Wednesday unveiled the so far world’s largest mass-produced solid state drive (SSD), which may substitute a fully-fledged hard disk drive, but which also features exceptional performance and pretty high price.

PQI’s 256GB SSD Turbo+ features transfer rates of up to 60MB/s, a figure that cannot be achieved on current hard disk drives. In addition, the new product has better reliability, power consumption and sizes. The price of the device is not announced, however, it is as unprecedented as the capacity of the 256GB solid state drive. According to DRAMeXchange, contract price of a single 16Gb (2GB) chip is about $17.04 on average, which means that memory alone for the new device costs $2181.12.

“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,” said Bob Chu, PQI disk-on-module division manager said.

In addition to the 256GB SSD, PQI also unveiled PCI Express SSD that dedicated to notebooks in the form of a removable storage medium and 1.8” 32GB ZIF interface SSD,  an industrial storage option. Pricing of such components is unknown.

“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,” Mr. Chu added.