While the future of Ultrabooks might be in question, there's no doubt that manufacturers are trending towards thinner, lighter, and more powerful machines, and that has peripheral and component makers all vying a piece of the pie. Enter Mushkin, which just announced a line of slim 7mm solid state drives intended for Ultrabooks. In addition to their slim profile, Mushkin's new Chronos Deluxe SSDs sport performance-oriented SandForce controllers and SATA 6Gbps interfaces.

It's not really fair to pit an enterprise grade PCIe solid state drive (SSD) against a typical consumer grade model sporting a SATA interface, like Samsung's 840 Series announced earlier today, but that doesn't mean we're any less impressed with the fact that RunCore's new Kylin III SSD manages 3 million random read IOPS and 1.4 million random write IOPS. It's safe to say it can run Crysis, and anything else you throw at it, though it's really meant to tackle workstation tasks that include database chores, web servers, analytic engines, and anything involved with high performance computing servers in general.

For those of you paying attention, it's hard not to notice the downward trend in solid state drive pricing, which in some cases has fallen below a buck per gigabyte on high end SSDs. Be that as it may, market research firm IHS iSuppli believes mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) will remain the dominant storage platform now and in the near term future, even as Microsoft's Surface tablet and other competing SSD-only devices enter the market place.