Peel open an ultra-slim notebook, Ultrabook, or tablet PC and you might discover an mSATA solid state drive (SSD) tucked inside. These compact drives are much smaller than a regular 2.5-inch SSD, and should you retire your ultra-slim down the line, or otherwise run across an mSATA drive, your options for plopping them into your desktop or full size notebook are few and far between. One option, however, is an Addonics 2.5-inch flash drive kit.

Anyone who's been around PCs for a length of time remembers when Plextor had a reputation for building top-shelf optical drives. For the most part, they were fast performing and reliable, and of course more expensive than your average bargain-bin burner. Plextor still sells optical drives, but like everyone else, the company also dabbles in solid state drives. The company's newest SSD product is the M3 Series with "True Speed" technology and a comparatively lengthy 5-year warranty.

Seagate has started shipping the second generation of its Momentus XT, a solid state hybrid drive aimed at both consumer and commercial laptop applications, and the company's fastest driver ever for personal computers, Seagate says. Like the previous generation Momentus XT, this second gen drive moves frequently accessed data to a small chunk of solid state memory for faster access.

After peering into its crystal ball, the market psychics at Kingston firmly believe that by this time next year, you're likely to choose a solid state drive over a mechanical hard drive. NAND flash memory prices are coming down, and while it's been slow going, overall pricing for SSDs will finally reach the point where they're able to attract would-be HDD buyers.