Patriot's scorching hot Inferno series SSDs have spread to three new capacities -- 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB -- joining the existing 100GB and 200GB models.

Built for performance, these MLC-based drives boast up to 285MB/s read and up to 275MB/s write speeds, as well as an obscene 24K IOPS (write) at 4K file sizes. In other words, these little fireballs are fast, which is starting to become standard fare for SSDs built around the SandForce SF-1200 controller.

"The Inferno series of SSDs are the fastest and most exciting that Patriot has yet brought to the market," states Les Henry, Vice President of Engineering at Patriot. "Our Inferno series has been well received and reviewed. We are excited to expand the product family with the introduction of the new larger capacity Inferno drives as well as the new 60GB capacity option. With the addition of the 60GB capacity drive, enthusiasts can enjoy the blistering performance of the Inferno SSD at a more affordable price point making it ideal as a boot drive in a high performance system."

For those who plan to do that, all Inferno series SSDs ship with a 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch adapter plate. No word yet on price or availability.

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OCZ is hoping its new RevoDrive will bring PCI-E based SSD storage to the masses, and given the price points, that's a real possibility.

The drive comes in both 120GB and 240GB capacities with MSRPs set at $390 and $700, respectively. Not exactly cheap, but in line with what other high-performance SSDs are going for. And unlike their SATA based brethren, the RevoDrive SSDs aren't bound by the same bottlenecks.

"The RevoDrive is the first PCIe SSD that delivers both performance and affordability and radically alters the SSD landscape," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Up to this point PCIe SSDs have been reserved for enterprise applications and priced out of the range of many consumers, the bootable RevoDrive SSD changes the game by delivering a PCIe based solution that costs as low as $3 per gigabyte, exceptional small file write IOPS of over 80K, which is the most available in any low-cost solution."

The RevoDrive features a proprietary RAID 0 design that helps it ramp up transfer rates to up to 540MB/s read and up to 480MB/s write speeds, or nearly twice that of traditional SATA-based SSDs.

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Until prices come down to pedestrian levels, there's only so much headway SSD vendors can make in the consumer market. That isn't the case on the enterprise side, where companies have the money to spend on pricier SSDs, and a greater need for faster performing drives.

Along those lines, we've seen a few SSDs aimed at SMBs in recent times, the most recent of which is Super Talent's new ShuttleCraft Series SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) SSD family.

"Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a new interface standard designed to meet the storage needs of the Enterprise market.," Super Talent said. "SAS features key benefits required by enterprise servers including: high performance, strong reliability and advanced management features. Already known for extreme reliability, Solid State Disk (SSD) technology can be improved to meet the needs of the enterprise by implementing advanced: Wear Leveling, Bad Block Management, Error Correction and Power Failure Management features. These new features are the cornerstones of our ShuttleCraft Series SAS drive products."

The new drives come in both SLC and MLC flavors, including the ShuttleCraft S60 (60GB, SLC), S120 (120GB, SLC), M120 (120GB, MLC), and M240 (240GB, MLC).

Look for the ShuttleCraft Series to start shipping in July. No word yet on price.

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Samsung sounds awfully excited about its latest SSD, a 512GB drive utilzing "toggle-mode DDR NAND" memory. It's the first SSD to do so, and according to Samsung, this is a pretty major deal. As Samsung explains it, toggle-mode DDR allows for higher performance without a subsequent increase in power consumption.

"The resulting power throttling capability enables the drive’s high-performance levels without any increase in power consumption over a 40nm-class 16Gb NAND-based 256GB SSD," Samsung said. "The controller also analyzes frequency of use and preferences of the user to automatically activate a low-power mode that can extend a notebook’s battery life for an hour or more."

Samsung's first-run SSD to employ this technology checks in with up to 250MB/s sequential read and up to 220MB/s sequential write speeds. Respectable, though not earth shattering when considering that the competition has begun cranking out high-performance SSDs with read and write speeds in the vicinity of 280MB/s.

Volume production is expected to begin next month. No price has yet been set.

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