Back in November, we wrote about Corsair’s announcement to begun a mass production of 256GB SSDs for notebooks and desktop PCs. The company had been analyzing the solid-state market very closely a few months prior and had finally chosen to release its first MLC NAND flash product in late January, the 2.5-inch 128GB model dubbed S128.

Just a few months later, Corsair has just released its first 2.5-inch 256GB model based on 30nm Samsung MLC NAND flash. The new model, dubbed P256, is a high-performance SSD capable of delivering read speeds of up to 220MB/sec and write speeds of up to 200MB/sec. It is equipped with a whopping 128MB of cache memory and features support for Native Command Queuing to ensure that the drive has commands to process while the system is busy processing CPU tasks.

“The Corsair Storage Solutions P256 delivers the best computing experience of any single storage drive available today,” said John Beekley, VP of Applications Engineering at Corsair, “Using the P256 results in immediate and dramatic improvements in system startup and shutdown, game level loading, application startup, and many other everyday tasks. Additionally, the P256 is more durable and reliable than hard disk drives, and has been shown in the Corsair Labs to provide up to 25% longer battery life in portable computers.”

The Corsair P256 (CMFSSD-256GBG2D) is backed by a two-year warranty and can be had for around $669 in the US and €556 in Europe respectively.