CNet.com is reporting that Samsung is pouring tons of research and development money into the creation of high-capacity solid-state hard drives. So far, the company has produced one of the largest capacity solid-state drives available — a 256 GB flash-type drive. Samsung unveiled the new drive at their annual Mobile Solution Forum, held this year in Taipei, Taiwan.

Solid-state hard drives aren’t exactly new; flash drives, for example, have been around for years now, and are gradually increasing in storage capacity, while getting smaller and physical size. But a solid-state drive large enough to serve as the main hard drive of a laptop or desktop computer has been mostly a fantasy so far.

Samsung plans to change all that with a new line of 2.5 inch, high-capacity solid-state drives, capable of storing 256 GB or more of data — significantly more than the standard notebook PC hard drive today.

Additionally, the new solid-state drives will access information quicker than traditional hard drives. The new Samsung 256 for example, reads data at a rate of 200 MB per second, and can write data at 160 MB per second, one of the fastest data transfer rates ever developed.

The advantages of solid-state hard drives are many. They are capable of faster accessing speeds, and are generally considered more reliable, and less susceptible to fluctuations in heat and humidity. Because solid-state drives have no moving parts, they are also ideal to use in notebook PCs, palmtop organizers and even smartphones.

Samsung will begin production on their new line of solid-state drives later this year, with the first commercially available models expected to be available in September. But even though Sam’s song is virtually leading the way and development of high-capacity solid-state drives, they are sure to have significant competition by the years end. Intel is also planning to debut a high-capacity solid-state drive later this year, and the company has negotiated to include the drive in certain notebook PC models available with Centrino 2 mobile processor.

Like the Samsung drives, the Intel models will use a multi-level cell configuration, and will feature a high-speed ATA II serial interface. The result could be some of the fastest access times ever for a notebook computer.

Traditional hard drives “spin” in order to access data. The mechanical movements involved limit the seek time, and make it difficult to obtain ultra-fast access to data. The solid-state drives, by comparison, access every segment with in the drive simultaneously, without needing to “spin” or wait for mechanical moving parts. And although the price tag for a solid-state drive is considerably high at the moment, prices are expected to level off over the next few years as high-capacity SSD’s (solid-state drives) become more commonplace.

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