Solid Stage Storage technology is inevitably the way of the future; the technology itself has somewhat matured now, certainly enough for it to be an attractive alternative at both the enterprise and consumer level. There's just two things however that still need to be delt with; the first being capacity limitations, and the second and foremost being the pricing as they are still out of reach for most to consider.

Super Talent are doing their bit to help drive pricing down in the SSD market; they've just launched a new line of "MasterDrive" 2.5" solid state drives comprising the MX 30GB, 60GB and 120GB models. These are some of the most aggressively priced SSDs seen to date with the respective models coming in at RRPs of $299, $449, and $649.

The drives themselves use a SATA-II interface and make use of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory; for this reason, their write speeds are nothing to write home about, but read speeds for entry level SSDs are quite respectable at around 120MB/sec.

For more information on the MasterDrive MX series (and higher spec'd/priced DX series which utilize SLC NAND flash), you can find Super Talent's official PR here.

MasterDrive SSDs use NAND Flash rather than magnetic platters as the storage medium, giving them many advantages over HDDs. These drives have no moving parts, and therefore are completely silent, lighter weight and more reliable than HDDs. Moreover, they consume a fraction of the power of HDDs, meaning they produce less heat and offer longer battery life in mobile computing.