Hardware manufacturer Super Talent has just announced mass availability for its industry slimmest solid state drive that packs 256GB of storage space in a few square inches. Called the FSD56GC25H, the newest offering from Super Talent comes with a SATA-I interface and is completely interchangeable with any SATA-based conventional hard-drive.

According to company officials, Super Talent's drive can pack an enormous amount of NAND flash memory in a small form factor thanks to its patented stacking technology. The drive is 12.5 millimeters thick, and Super Talent claims that it is 40 percent thinner than any other 256 GB competitor. Despite the fact that it is an internal drive, the company paid extra attention to its outer shell design and covered the delicate circuitry in a black, lightweight aluminum alloy.

"We designed this drive for applications that need rugged and reliable storage in a very compact form factor. This is the world's smallest and thinnest 256GB SSD," said Super Talent Marketing Director, Joe James. "This product underscores our leadership in high density SSDs and demonstrates the technical capabilities of our Silicon Valley engineering team," James added.

The new solid-state drive boasts access times of 0.1-millisecond, as well as read and write speeds of 65MB/sec and 50MB/sec, respectively. This is not as impressive as OCZ's ultra-high speed offering, but while OCZ's drives are pitched at the enterprise and server markets, Super Talent is more concerned with the average notebook PC consumer.

The FSD56GC25H drive is also extremely reliable. Super Talent's drive can support up to 1600G of shock and 16G of vibration, which makes it five times more resistant to physical damage than any typical hard-disk drive counterpart. Moreover, the wear leveling controller built inside the drive ensures that the information is spread uniformly across the NAND flash chips, in order to prevent them from prematurely wearing out.

There is no word on pricing yet, as the drive is currently shipping to original equipment manufacturers only.