Over the last few months, there have been several new upgrade hard drives and SSDs that have been announced for notebooks and netbooks. One of the common issues for computer users wanting a larger hard drive is getting the data from their computer over to the new drive.

Apricorn has announced a new upgrade kit called the SATA Wire that is a cable that connects to the SATA SSD or HDD and to your PC USB port. The kit also includes software for Mac and Windows machines to migrate data to the new drive.

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 starting to replace the traditional HDD in computers and notebooks. The SSD is faster and uses less power to operate making for longer battery life on notebooks. The catch is that the typical SSD is still too expensive for most computer users. OCZ makes a line of lower cost SSDs and has announced that it has a new family of SSDs coming to market using SandForce SSD processors.

The new SSDs will debut in the coming weeks leading up to CES 2010 in January. The drives will be offered in enterprise and consumer versions using 3Gbps SATA or 6Gbps SAS interfaces. The drives will be built with both MLC and SLC NAND memory inside.

If you purchased a netbook from Asus a while back that used an SSD, you may have the thing packed with files now and be out of storage space. If so you are in luck; a company called Active Media Products has unveiled a line of upgrade SSDs that offer more performance and more storage.

The new line of SSDs is called the SaberTooth S4 series and they are compatible with the Asus S101, 900, 900A, 901, and 1000 Eee netbooks. They will also work with other machines that use mini PCIe card storage with the SATA-II interface.

SSDs are much faster than traditional HDDs and allow users to boot their computers faster and access applications more quickly. The SSD is always being improved with prices going down and performance increasing.

A-DATA announced today what it claims to be the industry’s fastest SSD called the S596. The SSD is a 2.5-inch device with sequential read speeds of 250MB/sec and sequential write speeds of 180 MB/sec/ the drive also has a SDRAM cache for more performance.

For a long time upgrading your computer to an SSD was a very expensive proposition. Thankfully, the cost of SSDs has come down significantly in the last few months. Kingston just unveiled a new SSD boot drive upgrade package that sells for $84.99 after rebates.

Before those rebates the SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive kit sells for $115. The drive kit includes the 40GB SSD, drive cloning software, power, and data extension cables, and adapters to make the 2.5-inch drive fit a 3.5-inch bay.

PureSilicon has upgraded its Renegade R2 SSD series with a brand new 256GB version. The drive features 255MB/sec sequential read rates and 180MB/sec sequential write rates and supports MIL-STD-810F standards so that it can hold up in extreme temperatures and to shock and vibration.

The tough and rugged 256GB SSD drive will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2010 along with encrypted versions. The PureSilicon 256GB SSD Drive is also available in 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities.

Dane-Elec has just announced a new line of So SuperSpeed hard drives and SSDs which use the up and coming USB 3.0 standard. The drives can hit the amazing speed of 250MBps which is about ten times that of USB 2.0.

Capacities range from 500GB to 2TB for the hard drive. The SSDs come in 80GB and 160GB capacities. The So SuperSpeed drives will hit on December 11th, with the 500GB hard drive costing $180 while the SSDs will cost you $400 and $800 for the 80GB and 160GB capacities.

If your gadget isn’t up to your standards, just mod it and make it so. While searching for a replacement hard drive for his old school iRiver H300, Andrew decided to go with an SSD drive for more reliability. He couldn’t find the proper SSD drive to replace the H300s so instead he looked for a broken hard drive player to combine with an SSD drive.

So he found a broken Zune 120 and a refurbished SanDisk EIDE/PATA SSD drive and married them. Total cost was $130. If you want to do this yourself, Andrew has some instructions for you.

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.

Super Talent announced a crazy fast SSD that doesn’t use the SATA interface that most SSDs use. That old and tired SATA interface is just too slow for Super Talent’s needs, the RAIDDrive slips into a vacant PCIe slot on the mainboard.

The PCIe slot allows the RAIDDrive to support sequential read speeds of up to 1.4GB/sec and sequential write speeds of up to 1.2GB/sec. Inside the RAIDDRive are four separate SSDs that use the SATA interface and higher capacity RAIDDrives cram eight SSDs into the RAIDDrive SSD.

The SSD is a tough sell today. A few consumers buy them for their superior performance compared to a plain HDD. The higher levels of performance are offset for many consumers by the fact that the SSD costs so much more to purchase and has less storage space than most HDDs.

Samsung has decided to target the enthusiast gaming segment with its latest 256GB SSD. Samsung says that the fast performance is perfect for gaming. The higher performance for the SSD could mean faster load times for levels and better performance in game.

It seems like each week we have new SSDs hitting the market. That is a good thing, the more options we have for SSDs on the market, the lower the price tends to be. SSDS are still considerably more expensive than comparable hard drives today though.

Kingston has announced its latest SSD called the SSDNow V+. The SSD is designed for high performance with higher input and output operations per second and faster read and write speeds. The drive is a 2.5-inch form factor.

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.

As NAND flash makers reduce the size of the build process they use a lot of good things happen. The products using the flash storage derived from the NAND products consumer less power, produce less heat, and can be mode for less money.

Intel has announced the industry’s first 34nm SSDs this week that reduce the price of the SSDs by up to 60% compared to the previous 50nm Intel SSDs. The new MLC X25-M SSD is intended for the laptop and desktop market and is available in 80GB and 160GB capacities.