SSDs are slowly coming down in price to the point where the average computer fan can afford to buy one to use in their system. That said, they are still much more expensive than hard drives with tons more storage space. Super Talent added a new SSD to its line today called the UltraDrive DX that is a branded Toshiba product.

The SSD uses MLC NAND inside and has read speed of up to 230MB/sec and write speeds of up to 180MB/sec. The drives also have dual protection layers with encrypted password protection and data randomization technology to prevent blocks of data from being stolen.

OCZ has announced more details about their 1TB Colossus SSD. First shown at Computex, the storage device now finally has a release date and pricing information. This new drive will hold a 3.5-inch drive bay and is capable of handling up to 250MB/s read and 200MB/s write speeds. All of this on a SATA II interface. A JMicron controller drives the RAID 0.

It will cost you a hefty $2,500 when the 1TB OCZ Colossus SSD is released by the middle of this month. A 512GB version should arrive soon however if the 1TB isn’t in your budget.

The InnoDisk 128GB Nano SSD drive is not your typical micro USB flash drive. It’s a full fledged 128GB beast in a micro form. Future netbooks will have more storage in less space with the InnoDisk installed, which leaves room for other cool stuff. And we do want it all in a small form factor.

It’s pretty awesome. In the video above, the tiny drive functions flawlessly with 20g’s of accelerative force being placed on it.

I am still not ready to start looking at upgrading any of my notebook or desktop computer to SSDs. At this point, the SSD is still too expensive for the slight benefit a consumer will get from the SSD upgrade. I will hold out until prices drop significantly for SSDs and capacities are more in line with what you can get on a traditional HDD.

Those who want to upgrade to an SSD for their notebook or desktop now can get new SSDs and upgrade kits from Imation. The company has announced that it is shipping its S-class and M-class SSDs along with all-in-one upgrade kits.

Fusion-io is famous for producing the world’s fastest and most expensive SSD solution. Now it has another blazing fast innovation that should have you drooling in no time. The ioDrive Duo is hailed as the fastest and most innovative SSD on the planet thus far.

The server-based PCI Express SSD is aimed at enterprises who can and will pay more for vast quantities of lightning fast storage space. So, what’s the speed? 1.5GB sustained read speeds and 1.4GB sustained write speeds. Say it with me. Wow!

Just so you know, this is a piece of Samsung marketing material. It also happens to be pretty damn amazing and may make you judge your own computer unfit. A bunch of Samsung geeks strung 24 256GB SSD drives together in a RAID with the hopes of making the fast SSD drives even faster.

The system reaches transfer speeds of 2GBps. Here’s what that means in simple terms. All of Microsoft Office opens in .5 seconds, 53 programs from the test rig’s Start menu open in 18 seconds and the entire system defrags in about 3 seconds. In comic book terms, this is like if the Flash did a line of coke, drank a case of jolt cola, snorted pure sugar and for some reason his butt is was on fire. Yeah, its that fast!

We had heard talk about Samsung’s 256GB solid state drive back in May and it appears that today the talk has finally come true. Samsung has announced they are now officially manufacturing the large Flash-based drive, and we can tell you it’s fast. What we can’t tell you yet is how much it costs.

The speed of the 256GB drive is double that of Samsung’s 64GB and 128GB drives in what Samsung is calling “…disruptive performance”, with sequential read rates of 220MB/s and write rates of 200 MB/s. Applications can launch as much as 10 times faster than a 7200rpm notebook HDD with speeds that would be similar to a 15,000rpm drive.

Early this month OCZ announced its Core Series SSDs that brought pricing for SSD drives to significantly lower levels. Granted the SSDs in the Core series are still more than standard hard drives, but the savings compared to other SSDs on the market is very significant.

Laptop Magazine got its hands on a 64GB Core Series SSD and ran some tests to see how well the cut price SSD stacks up to more expensive SSDs and normal hard drives. The average read rate for the Core SSD was 112.4MBps and it had an average seek time of 1ms on Sisoft Sandra tests. HD Tach showed that the drive had an average read score of 89.5MBps and a seek time of 0.5ms.

Solid State Drives may well be the future of data storage in the computer industry, but with the high price of flash memory at this time SSDs are not seeing much adaption in the consumer market. So poor is the uptake by consumers for SSDs that Seagate will not even target the consumer market with its SSD line launching in 2009.

Somehow OCZ has got around the cost issue normally associated with SSDs with its latest offering called the Core Series SATA II Solid State Drive. OCZ says that the Core series are the first truly affordable SSDs and that the retail price of 50% less than competing products on the market.

Samsung has announced the world’s fastest MLC-based 256GB SATA solid state drive which boasts some amazingly fast read speeds of 200 mps and 160 mps write speeds. It’s also the thinnest and largest capacity drive with a SATA II interface. Salivating yet?

It measures just 9.5mm thick. No pricing info is available yet, but expect it to be expensive. Should you be able to afford one, they’ll be available this September, with a 1.8-inch version coming in Q4.

SSDs promise to give computer users faster data access, faster boot times, better power consumption and more. The catch is that to get all the benefits of a SSD you have to be willing to spend lots more money compared to a traditional HDD and give up significantly on storage space.

Super Talent has a new video of a demonstration it did to show exactly how well its SSD is able to stand up to vibration. One of the MasterDrive 120GB SSDs that retails for about $670 was strapped to a paint shaker and shook around like crazy.

I am still patiently waiting for the day when NAND flash gets cheap enough that we can stop using normal hard drives and go for SSD drives in our notebooks. I could certainly use all of the battery life I can get and faster boot speeds are great too.

Super Talent announced a new line of SSD drives today that are direct replacements for normal 2.5-inch hard drives and use the SATA-II interface. The drives are called MasterDrive SSD and use a proprietary algorithm to extend the life of the drives.

Sure SSD drives sound cool in theory with the promise of faster boot times and faster data access while being more shock resistant and dead silent. However, the high price of the typical SSD drive and the small storage space compared to typical normal hard drives makes the SSD pill hard to swallow for most.

Super Talent has announced a new SSD that it claims to be the world’s thinnest SSD drive. Sorry, but I hardly think making the drive thinner will get mortal geeks to pony up the extra loot. Since Super Talent is mostly looking at OEM suppliers for the drive, perhaps it will pop up in the next generation of super thin notebooks similar to the MacBook Air.

Samsung is trying to dispel some concerns consumers are having about using flash-based solid-state drives in their computers, saying they are more reliable that a lot of people think. Sure, having a 64GB SSD in your notebook at first sounds like a pretty good idea. Faster boot times, no moving parts to wear out, but then the price hits you. Adding that SSD can increase the overall price of the computer by as much as $900. Also, in terms of computing, a maximum 100,000 write cycles just doesn’t seem like that much.

Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, is assuring us that 100,000 write cycles is actually quite a bit. He states that the SSD can write 100,000 times to each and every memory cell, and the drive controller evens out the cells that get written to with “wear leveling”. As an example, Yang says that a 64GB SSD could be fully erased and filled again with data every hour and it would still last years before failing. He also said the failure would then likely come from the controller, not the memory cells. He also expects the price of SSDs to drop around 40 percent each year, making this alternative more affordable.

HP unveiled today a new energy efficient business focused desktop computer it says is the industry’s first to offer a solid state hard drive. It’s called the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC and pricing begins at around $1,260.

The HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC features a solid state hard drive as part of its configuration options. This drive provides quicker access to data and has no moving parts, eliminating quick wear out. This desktop computer is also designed to meet EPAT Gold environmental requirements.