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.

It takes a collective effort from component makers to realize Intel's vision of what an Ultrabook should look like, and Samsung is doing its part to keep the form factor slim and sleek. The storage maker just kicked off volume production of its Mini-Serial ATA (mSATA) solid state drives (SSDs) designed for all kinds of ultra-slim notebooks, and in particular Ultrabooks.

In Greek mythology, Talos was a giant bearded man made of bronze, a human statue forged by Hephaistos and tasked with circling the island of Crete three times a day to guard it against pirates. The Talos 2 is something completely different. It's a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD) series built for enterprise chores, and unlike its comparatively giant 3.5-inch predecessor, OCZ's second generation Talos series is available in a compact 2.5-inch form factor.

Plextor's new M3S Series of solid state drives rely on server-grade controllers from Marvell and 24nm NAND flash memory from Toshiba to do the heavy lifting, but when it comes to finessing file transfers, Plextor gives equal credit to its own exclusive firmware with True Speed technology and proprietary Bad Block Management, Global Wear Leveling, and Instant Restore technologies. All of these fancy terms combine to "prevent drastic drops in read/write speeds that normally occur with SSDs after prolonged use or when data becomes heavily fragmented," Plextor says.