Many of the new high-end motherboards are now coming with USB 3.0 port son them so the USB 3.0 gear on the market is becoming more usable. OCZ has announced a new USB 3.0 SSD called the Enyo.

Patriot has all sorts of hardware for computer users from memory to flash drives and SSDs. The company has unveiled a new SSD with lots of performance called the Zephyr series.

The Zephyr line comes in capacities of 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB. All of the new drives use the new JMicron JMF612 controller and have Windows 7 Trim support. The line does vary in write performance depending on capacity.

There have been two things keeping many from putting a SSD inside their computer. The first thing is price and the second is low storage capacity. OCZ has unveiled a new Onyx series SSD that fixes the price issue for most of us.

The new Onyx SSD is available now for under $100 for 32GB of storage. That isn’t much storage for most needs, but it will be a great little boot drive paired with an HDD for bulk storage. OCZ will offer larger capacity drives later.

Plextor has been in the optical drive market for years now. The company is branching out and has announced a pair of new SSDs that are available. The SSDs are the 64GB PX-64M1S and the 128GB PX-128M1S.

Both of the drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory and Marvell controller chipsets. The drives are both 2.5″ form factor units and use the SATA II interface. Plextor ships the SSDs with Acronis True Image software for backup and recovery.

The SSD is at some point going to replace the traditional HDD in many instances. Before that can happen though the SSD has to get more storage capacity and come down in price significantly. The performance benefits of a SSD compared to a HDD are already there. OCZ has added a new SSD to its Vertex line called the Vertex Limited Edition.

The LE SSD has more performance than the standard Vertex lien of drives. The SSD offers TRIM support for Windows 7 and uses MLC NAND for storage. The drive can resist shock up to 1500G and supports RAID configurations.

Corsair has a couple of new SSDs in the Nova and Reactor. The Nova comes in 64GB and 128GB capacities, while the Reactor series comes in 60GB and 120GB capacities. The Nova is a 2.5″ SSD that uses MLC NAND chips and 64MB of cache, for read speeds of up to 215MB/s on both the V128 and V64, with writing speeds of 130MB/s for the V64 drive and 195MB/s for the larger V128.

The Reactor series is equipped with a 128MB cache and read/write speeds of up to 250/110 MB/s for the 60GB model and 250/170 MB/s for the 120GB model. The Reactor series also features a mini USB port.

Back in August I mentioned the Micron C200 SSDs had tipped up with snazzy etched cases and good storage space. Micron has announced the next in its RealSSD line today called the C300 series.

The new series uses the SATA 6Gb/s interface making them some of the fastest SSDs ever. The new drives promise a read speed of up to 355MB/s and write speeds of up to 215MB/s. The drive scored 45,000 on the PC Mark Vantage HDD suite.

The price of SSDs keeps coming down and as they get cheaper, they are getting more and more attractive to me. I would like to put one in my work computer to speed things up. The things that I worry about when upgrading a HDD is getting data off the old drive and onto the new one and then what to do with the old HDD after the SSD update is complete.

Imation has unveiled a new SSD Upgrade Kit today that includes an external enclosure for your old drive so you can use it as an external storage device after the upgrade. The enclosure requires no power supply, which means it can be powered by USB.

The typical SSD is a smaller design that is sized to fit into a notebook or netbook computer. OCZ has unveiled a new SSD that is a 3.5-inch device sized for desktops and aimed at consumers and enterprise users.

The Colossus SSD is available in up to 1TB capacity and has an internal RAID 0 configuration for speed. OCZ claims that the drive has a maximum read speed of 260MB/s and a maximum write of 260MB/s and a sustained write speed of 220MB/s.

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!