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"Two years ago the best SSD you could buy was made by Intel and it cost $7.44 per GB of MLC NAND. Today Intel is actually the value leader. The 80GB X25-M G2 will set you back $205 at Newegg, or $2.56 per GB. The performance crown now belongs to companies like Micron and SandForce. Although Intel hopes to have performance leadership once more with its 25nm SSDs due out in Q4, the priorities have shifted. Intel’s focus is on bringing SSDs to the mainstream; it wants a bigger slice of the HDD pie. At the end of the day, that’s where the money is.

At just over $200 that’s affordable enough for high end notebooks and desktops but what about more mainstream price points? For many the $99 mark is key. Luckily as SSDs have gotten faster, a new breed of small, affordable SSDs have emerged right around the $100 mark. Today we’re going to take a look at three of those devices."

"We are going to digress from our tradition of comparing hard disk drives of the same capacity within a single review. Not long ago we wrote about 1-terabyte and then about 2-terabyte HDDs, so we already know HDDs of these capacities well enough. But as is often the case, soon after those reviews we came across a number of interesting products. They are too few, however, for us to write two independent reviews, but we do want to tell you about them. That’s why there are both 1- and 2-terabyte HDDs in this article."

"Lately, it feels like the good, old, reliable hard disk drive (HDD) doesn't get any respect. When it comes to storage, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are getting all the attention these days--and it's no wonder, considering the speed, durability, low-power, and silent-running attributes of current solid state drives. But SSDs are also very expensive and offer relatively low-capacities when compared to traditional HDDs. The vast majority of systems that use some sort of fixed drive for storage----be they desktops, workstations, or servers--still use HDDs. And when it comes to maximum storage capacity in a 3.5-inch form factor, you simply can't get any higher these days than a 2TB HDD.

In this roundup we take a look at a total of nine 3.5-inch, SATA, 2TB hard drives, from Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital.... "

"We've taken a look at a handful of drives from Kingston's V and V+ Series of solid state drives, and this time around we actually have the smallest capacity drive on hand. This 30GB drive is intended for use as a boot drive, meaning you load your operating system and core programs to it, and use a second drive for file storage."

"We got our hands on an X25-V and put it through the paces against Kingston's newfound replacement: the Toshiba based 30GB SSDNow V Series."

"We compared the performance of five different solid state drives (SSDs) on the 64 GB range based on MLC technology from Kingston, OCZ, Patriot, Mushkin and Intel. Results updated."

"Want to make the upgrade to a solid-state drive, but prefer to avoid the high cost of adoption? Kingston helps ease that pain with its SSDNow V Series 40GB, a modest drive that features Intel's NAND and impressive G2 firmware, which helps it deliver stellar performance when compared to an HDD, for an easy-to-stomach price."

"The third major SSD article on AnandTech is here. We go back and try to better understand how these SSDs work, how their performance is evolving and how TRIM is going to change everything going forward. If you read The Anthology, this is the SSD update you've been looking for."

"The first internal pics and a full performance preview of Intel's brand new 34nm X25-M G2 SSD. This thing rocks."

"WD's Caviar Black series SATA II hard drives feature a faster spindle speed and 32MB of onboard cache. Drive capacities range from 500GB through to 1.0TB, but all the Caviar Black series drives use Perpendicular Magnetic Recording."

"A company called DataSlide has unveiled a prototype of a new storage device that may one day replace both HDDs and SSDs. The prototype technology is called Hard Rectangular Disk or HRD. DataSlide says that the technology is patented and can achieve 160,000 IOPS and 500MB/sec performance levels while consuming under 4 watts of power."

"After what seemed like a few weeks of deafening silence, Seagate has finally acknowledged (officially) problems with their Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive series. We say series, as the potential list of affected drives is much larger than we first imagined when reports of drive failures escalated sharply in December."

"In Chris's first Solid State Disk review, he pits MTRON's MOBI 64GB SSD up against a traditional WD Raptor drive."

"A very interesting feature of the GreenPower drives is IntelliPower, which is a "fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance" according to WD. What this means to potential users is that WD isn't telling us the exact spindle speed of these drives. We know that they are likely spinning at a speed between 5400 and 7200 RPM and that each GreenPower model may use a different, invariable RPM. So, while WD made power the priority with the GreenPower platform, it did so without disregarding solid performance, a wise choice in our opinion.

In addition to IntelliPower, the Caviar GP and the RE2-GP feature perpendicular recording technology and some unique WD features, such as IntelliSeek (which tweaks seek rates to decrease power utilization, noise and vibration) and IntelliPark (which also helps decrease power utilization)."