Samsung prepares to make one profitable end-of-the-year deal by starting production on the fastest solid state drive (SSD) to date, a 2.5-inch, 256GB device that promises to offer faster transfer rates than any other similar device on the market.

The company made the announcement during the Samsung Mobile Solution Forum held at the Westin Taipei Hotel: this is the beginning of a new stage of evolution for the notebook PC, they said, as quoted by ZDNet Korea.

The new SSD will be 2.5-inch long, 9.5 mm-thick and will have sequential read speed of 200 MB/s and sequential write speed of 160 MB/s. The drive is based on the multi-level cell (MLC) technology and uses a SATA II interface.

Compared to any other SSD on the market, Samsung’s device will be based on three concepts: faster, smaller, better. By the end of the year, we could also be looking at a smaller, 1.8-inch version, as PC World reported.

Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor Inc. said during the Samsung Mobile Solution Forum that this change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, ZDNet Korea reports.

Furthermore, Elliott added, this is an initial step towards the thinner, smaller generation of SSD-based notebooks with improved performance and more than ample storage.

SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. They can also improve battery life by up to 20 percent in notebooks.

Although, with no moving parts, the flash-based SSD starts working almost immediately to achieve far better access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive. Analysts expect to witness a continuous SSD market growth at a fast rate by 2012.

Regarding Samsung’s latest device, there still is a pricing issue, and analysts can only speculate on the costs to be expected. We’ll just have to wait a few more months before more details will be made public.