The price of SSDs are starting to come down where many computer users might be considering buying one. You can now get a few low capacity SSDs for around $100. The catch to these cheap SSDs is that they don’t offer much storage making them really only useful for boot drives.

Intel has unveiled its new X25-V SSD with 40GB of storage space. The SSD sells for $125 in quantities of 1000 and is aimed at notebooks, netbooks, and desktop computers looking for a fast boot drive for the OS and critical applications.

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.

Corsair has a full line of storage and memory products that it has been offering for a long time. The company has flash drives, enthusiast class RAM for PCs and makes lots of memory for notebooks too. Corsair also has several SSD offerings and its latest SSDs are now available.

The new SSDs are the Force series and promises read speeds up to 285MB/s and write speeds up to 275MB/s. The SSD line is offered in 100GB or 200GB capacities and both use Sandforce controllers.

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.

CeBIT is a show that is much more focused on computer hardware and other items than CES is. CeBIT kicked off today in Germany and among the new PC hardware being shown off is the Team Xtreem-S1 SSD.

The SSD uses a Sandforce processor for performance and promises up to 270MB/s read speed and write speed of 260MB/s. The SSD uses the SATA II 3Gb/sec interface and supports Windows 7 Trim function.

At CES last month SanDisk unveiled it’s new G3 SSD. The SSD promises lots more performance than a traditional HDD and less power consumption. At the time SanDisk didn’t say how much the G3 would cost or when it would ship.

SanDisk has now announced that the G3 is available online and will be landing in stores soon. The G3 will be available in 60GB and 120GB capacities. Both promise up to 220MB/sec of sequential read and up to 120MB/sec sequential write performance.

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.

I have a SSD that has been sitting around my office for months now that I haven’t used. I know that it would make my machine faster, but I don’t want to have to mess with moving all my software and installing an OS on the drive.

SilverStone has a new product called the HDDBOOST that claims to be able to improve the performance of a HDD by up to 70% by combining it with an SSD. The HDDBOOST installs into an internal drive bay and connects to a SSD and the HDD already in your system.

I mentioned earlier this month that Kingston had unveiled a new 30GB SSD kit that was on the chap side for those looking for a nice boot drive in SSD form. The problem is that if you want to store lots of data to the SSD, 30GB is nowhere near enough space for most of us.

Kingston has fixed the lack of space in the SSDNow V+ line with the introduction of a new 512GB SSD. The new drive has Windows 7 TRIM support and is a 2.5-inch form factor drive. The kit has rails to convert it to a 3.5-inch size for desktops.

There are many computer users out there waiting for the SSD to come down in price enough that it is easy to afford the new tech. The SSD has many benefits over the standard HDD and once the price comes down many more computer users will probably upgrade.

Kingston showed off a new SSD at CES that is very well priced. The SSD is called the SSDNow V series 30GB Boot Drive and it ships with Windows 7 TRIM functionality. The SSD will be priced at $79.99 when it launches in February after rebates.

Along with the picture above, Seagate has the following message “All These Planets Are Yours Except Europa, Attempt No Landing There.” And so Seagate has announced their first line of SSDs, named Pulsar. It’s a 2.5-inch drive in 50GB, 100GB and 200GB capacities.

The Pulsar drives are all 3Gb/s SATA compatible, with top read/write speeds of 240MB/s and 220MB/s. For comparison purposes, Intel’s X25-M hits 250MB/s read but only 100MB/s write, and the X25-M tops out at 160GB capacity.

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 hazard of being among the first to apply updates and new firmware to your gear is that you are also among the first to realize there might be a problem. A while back Intel offered a new firmware update for its X25-M and X18-M SSDs and users found a big problem when applied to SSDs with Windows 7.

The big problem was that the firmware update killed Windows 7 installs, which is a big issue considering the operating system is required and all. Intel removed the firmware from its website after the problem arose. Intel has now announced that it is trying again and has a new firmware on its site to add TRIM back to the SSDs.

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.