All of these new SSDs are part of the Crucial m4 series, they are all 2.5-inch drives and are SATA 6Gb/s compliant, that said they are also backwards compatible to the 3Gb/s standard, however you will not get the 415MB/s maximum read speed if you are using the older interface.

To make these SSDs so fast Crucial has used high-speed synchronous MLC NAND, optimized NAND management and advanced controller technology. There are four capacities available 64GB (model: CT064M4SSD2), 128GB (model: CT128M4SSD2), 256GB (model: CT256M4SSD2) and 512GB (model: CT512M4SSD2) as you would have probably guessed prices start off affordable, however soon get a bit pricey.

The 64GB variant costs just $129.99, whilst the 128GB model costs $249.99, things get expensive with the 256GB model which costs $499.99 and the 512GB model costs a whopping $999.99. When you look at write speeds you will see that the two larger capacity models are superior and offer transfer speeds of 260MB/s (using SATA 6Gbps), whilst the 128GB model offers writes speed of up to 175 MB/s and the 64GB drive offers write speeds of just 95 MB/s.

If you are looking to buy a solid-state drive you can check out Crucials new offerings here, all of which come with limited three-year warrantys, for the rest of the tech specs check out this fully detailed PDF file.

Will you buy and SSD in 2011?