Starting off the week in style, 
One thing the storage market doesn't lack is a healthy selection of solid state drives (SSDs), and you can be up to your eyeballs in options when shopping a new drive. How does a company separate itself from the pack? If you're Plextor, you tap Marvell to provide the controller chipset and then boast about "unique enterprise-grade double-data protection technology" baked into each SSD.
Corsair's no newcomer in the SSD market, but its new Force Series GS SSDs bring something new to the company's table: toggle NAND flash memory. Corsair claims that one tweak has made the Force Series GS drives the fastest models in its SandForce 2000-series lineup.
If you watched HDD prices soar after the Thailand floods and found yourself grumbling that SSDs should be cheaper, good news! Your wish has come true, at least to some degree. The hardworking souls over at The Tech Report and Camelegg have analyzed scads and scads of SSD price points over the past year and found that prices are down nearly 50 percent in that time frame, with several models now dropping below the vaunted $1/GB price point.
One of the big knocks against SSDs is that they simply don't have the same storage capacities as traditional mechanical HDDs. Well, that argument's about to fly out the window: OCZ is finally making good on its promise to deliver a 1TB SSD as part of its 2.5-inch Octane lineup.
Eight out of ten geeks agree: once you've taken an SSD's blazing fast speeds for a whirl, it's hard to go back to standard HDDs. (The last two geeks horde ripped HD video files like they're going out of style.) The problem is, the comparatively sky-high price point of SSDs have kept most folks away from their oh-so-sweet performance. New reports indicate that may change in the coming months, however, as the big movers and shakers in the SSD industry lower prices to try and squeeze out the little guys.
In last month’s roundup of solid-state drives, Intel’s entrant bore Marvell’s 9174 6Gb/s SATA controller, rather than an Intel one. While the Intel 510 SSD performed respectably among its 6Gb/s SATA peers, it’s not the top-to-bottom Intel drive fans have been waiting for. That drive is finally here, and despite the Intel 320 Series nomenclature, this is the third generation in Intel’s X25-M series of mainstream solid-state drives. But is a drive with a 3Gb/s SATA controller really going to cut it in 2011?
If the automotive world progressed as fast as the computer industry, the old joke goes, we‘d all have $1,000 cars that get 400 miles to the gallon, never need maintenance, and crash catastrophic-ally every eight weeks for no reason. Ancient punch lines aside, comparing this year’s storage options to those of even half a decade ago would be like entering a Bugatti Type 35 in the Preakness Stakes.
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