Whenever you buy yourself a new ultrabook you know that the storage device that hides away out of sight is not the quietest and fastest that it could be, but there are ways in which you can rectify this issue. The new Plextor M5M mSATA SSD series for 2013 is designed to give your ultrabook the ultimate upgrade, although you’ll have to pay the price for the privilege.

The M5M series will come with a choice of three storage sizes, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB, each of these will achieve read speeds of 540 MB/s. However write speeds vary on the model, these are 160 MB/s, 320 MB/s and 430 MB/s, in that order. When SSDs were fist launched their time before they failed were not that great, but you’ll be pleased to know that these new models will offer at least 2.4 million hours of use before they go to silicon heaven.

Plextor’s M5M mSATA SSD series price range has not been announced just yet or a release date either. However, we don’t expect these drives to be cheap when you consider their specs along with the impressive security features as well. The M5M mSATA series will come with Plextor’s True Protect Technology, which offers enterprise grade protection for your storage device, this high level of data protection has 128-bit error correction along with exclusive firmware to go with it.

While some of you may not have heard of Plextor before just know that these are one of the most reliable brands for SSDs on the market, and while the company has yet to offer details of the M5M mSATA on their website, you could consider the M5P series for now. However, this is only meant to support the storage devcie that you currently have in your ultrabook and not as an upgrade option. (Image thanks to AnandTech)

Samsung’s SSD technology is ever evolving and now their latest purchase will help the brand provide the very best solid state drives. The South Korean company has recently announced that they have now purchased NVELO, Inc., which we know is a company that pioneers in software storage, which can only benefit us in the long run. Samsung like so many other companies do not wish to do all the leg work in order to incorporate certain technology into their portfolio, so would rather acquire a company who already has a knowledge of said tech.

Since the SSD was first introduced there has been a great number of improvements to their speed, but Samsung knows that in order to stay ahead of the game they need to get clever, and if that means buying up a company that can intelligently optimize and manage storage within the SSD then so be it. However, being the first to release a 480GB single mSATA module SSD in January 2013 is another way to try and stay out in front. This is certain to open Samsung up to a much broader market, which is a must in this ever-competitive market.

In the report there is no mention of how much this purchase cost Samsung, but NVELO’s patent assets are certain to more than make up for it. Samsung certainly shows no signs of slowing down because they have already set aside $3-4 billion in their Austin, Texas-based plant, as the need to upgrade their chip making facility was long overdue. We’re certain that the popularity of the Galaxy S3 and the Note 2 has something to do with it, along with the iPhone 5 of course, as Apple purchases the chips that go into their smartphones from Samsung.

We wonder how long it will be before Samsung is able to take advantage of NVELO’s know how and release a new SSD with some of the newly acquired tech? Maybe the first range to incorporate this technology will be the pro Series, but would you agree?

While the price of SSDs have not fallen as much as we had hoped there seems to be no stopping this technology from moving forward, and the Mushkin 480GB SSD is proof of that. However, looking at a review of Intel’s latest SSD range they are also doing their best to improve on this technology, and believe it or not offer competitive pricing as well.

The Mushkin SSD is the first 480GB single mSATA module SSD and will be released in January, and while the $500 price tag may seem a little high for some, we can tell you that this is a pretty reasonable price. Looking on Mushkin’s official website their latest offering comes with a SandForce SF-2281 controller SATA III (6Gb/s) interface and unthrottled IOPS, which is protected with a three-year warranty.

If this model is not to your liking then you’ll be pleased to know that Mushkin have other 480GB options for you, but not mSATA. Firstly there’s the 7mm Chronos Deluxe 480GB Solid State Drive, the standard Chronos, and finally the Callisto deluxe. Again more details can be found by visiting their website.

To some, paying $500 is just too much so look for smaller capacity SSDs, so maybe you should consider the 335 Series, but because this only has 240GB of storage it works out $3-4 per GB compared to $1GB for the Mushkin 480GB SSD. When you think of it like that the $500 price doesn’t seem that bad after all. Maybe if you were to review Intel’s latest SSD then you will be able to weigh up the pros and cons to see what brand is for you.

However, just to make things a little tougher you might want to check out the Intel SSD DC S3700 Series Enterprise review, which offers both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors. The former consists of 100GB-800GB storage, while the latter come with 200GB and 400GB storage capacity. It’s clear that the SSD market is heating up and because of a greater choice this will only benefit you and I because of more competitive pricing.

Most computers users have known the advantage of solid-state drives for a while, although this option has been out of their reach thanks to the expense, but this is starting to change. There’s not only cheaper upgrades to SSD, but you’d also find much more affordable solutions when purchasing a new laptop or desktop computer. The Samsung 840 SSD with 250GB isn’t the brands best solid-state drive, although it certainly shows how Samsung are the most improved when it comes to SSD. Today we wanted to point our readers in the direction of a few Samsung 840 SSD reviews, and also include a hands-on video review that details the pros and cons for this hardware.

Samsung 840 SSD and Pro visual review – if you prefer to see how good a product is visually, then you can see just that for the Samsung 840 SSD in the first video below this article, which delivers a closer look at both the standard and Pro versions of the Samsung 840 SSD with an overview of features.

The video runs for just under 11 minutes and doesn’t look at the Samsung 840 SSD in great detail, but rather explains the main specs overall, although the video creator does cover an extremely detailed review in text form as well. This can be seen in 7 pages for the 256GB Samsung 840 Pro Series here and also 9 pages on the 250GB Samsung 840 SSD here. Both of these reviews provide an introduction followed by a closer look at the interior and exterior, and then a number of benchmarks and tests.

Samsung 840 SSD with 250GB receives a bonus – we’ve heard that Samsung has officially announced some special pricing for this model, which runs from Black Friday 2012 until Cyber Monday. You’ll not only see the price discounted this weekend, but also there’s an option to download Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3 for nothing as well. You can read the full details on this offer in this article, which explains the different Samsung 840 SSD models involved in this promotion, 250GB only for free game, and their prices for this week only.

We’d love to know if you’ve experienced an SSD yet in a computer you own, and if so how much of a difference you found it? We’ve personally been using solid-state drives since the first MacBook Air included them, and our new 2012 iMac will have to include at least an SSD, but the Fusion Drive looks a favorable option right now as well.

All of the SSDs in this series have a 2.5-inch form-factor, capacities range from 128GB to 1TB (128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB) and for optimum performance you should connect them using SATA 3.0 technology. We are told that whilst other SSDs have been designed for certain applications, this new series should provide great performance across the board.

In terms of tech specs you can expect sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 400MB/s, also in terms of latency you can expect 0.06ms read speeds and 0.09ms write speeds (lower than any commercially available SSD), there is also a DRAM cache of up to 512MB, TRIM support and SMART reporting.

When you look at day to day usage we are told that optimizations have been made to ensure fast boot times, also transfer rates should still be impressive when working with both compressible and uncompressable data – finally if you are security conscious we can confirm that there is support for encryption.

Exact prices have not been confirmed yet, but we are told to expect $1.10 to $1.30 per gigabyte, so for the 128GB model expect a price of $140 – $166, for the 256GB you are looking at between $281 and $332, just double these prices for the 512GB model ($562 – $664), as for the 1TB model expect anything from $1124 – $1328.

If you want to find out more about the Octane-S2 SSD series head over to Engadget for the full press release, we think that 256GB for around $300 sounds like a good deal, how about you?

Even with this done, boot up times for Microsoft Windows has always been slow and in most cases slower than Apple Mac’s. A few years ago we installed our first SSD (Solid State Drive) in a Windows computer, and following this we discovered how much faster an OS can boot up using SSD. It was a drastic improvement but also at a much higher price for the drive.

This was followed some years later with our first Mac purchase, the iMac with a normal drive and this booted up really fast in comparison to a Windows machine, which was obviously due to the way the Apple OS boots. With this in mind, we jumped ship and also bought a MacBook Air a little later with SDD. To say it was the fastest boot up yet would be an understatement.

Now we’re in 2011: SSD’s are much cheaper, we have Mac OS X Lion, and Windows 8 has a expected release date of some time in 2012. The battle between Windows and OS X boot up times has stepped up a gear, with Microsoft finally looking to catching up.

You can see a video below this article that shows an official demo of the Windows 8 boot up time, you have to see it to believe it. Just how is this achieved? You’ll want to read this article to find out more.

Could a much faster Windows boot up time make you want to jump from Mac to Windows?

So what is the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid? Well it merges the advantages of HDDs and SSDs together to create an affordable solution for those of you who want fast performance and lots of storage, It slots into your computer’s PCI Express slot and gives you 100GB of storage via SSD and a further 1TB of storage via a HDD. Below you can see what the product looks like (we think that it uses the PCI Express x4 slot).

In terms of performance OCZ tell us that “hot” data resides on the ultra-fast SSD, whilst “cold” data is stored on the HDD – apparently advanced caching algorithms learn your computer’s behaviour and enhances your system for responsiveness, which basically means frequently accessed data stored on the hybrid device such as the operating system and application files will be automatically sent to the the solid-state drive, whilst data which you access rarely will be transferred to the hard disk drive.

Specs are a little confusing, but according to the official OCZ press release the RevoDrive Hybrid removes the SATA bottleneck and will allow for bandwidth of up to 910MB/s and is also capable of 120,000 IOPS. Here is what OCZ have to say about its exciting new product:

“The RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid state drives and traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single easy to deploy PCIe storage drive. Leveraging Dataplex software to efficiently manage frequently accessed data delivers superior performance and capacity, making the RevoDrive Hybrid the ideal solution for high performance computing and media content creation.”

By the looks of things there will only be one capacity model available, this will have an MSRP of $499.99 and comes with a three-year warranty. This is not a lot when you consider the prices of SSDs today, let’s face it most of us only want quick boot up and fast loading applications, this hybrid device should allow for this and we think this kind of technology would be great for next-gen games consoles.

Do you think hybrid drives have a strong future?

All of the PM830 SSDs support the SATA 3.0 interface, which allows for 6Gb/s data transfer, the drives utilize multi-level cell NAND memory chips and the toggle DDR architecture, this is said to deliver double the performance of a SATA 3Gb/s drive – we are told that all of the drives in this series will deliver sequential read speeds of 500 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 350MB/s. In terms of capacity there will be 128GB, 256GB and 512GB options available.

If you are concerned about data security we can confirm that these drives use an AES 256-bit encryption algorithm to protect your data, in terms of performance a quote from the press release reads: “The SATA 6Gb/s SSD shortens system boot-up time to about 10 seconds, while its high-performance allows users to download up to five DVD video files in less than a minute”, it is a little unclear whether this is compared to a SATA 3Gb/s SSD or a SATA 3Gb/s HDD.

Currently prices are unknown, however Samsung seem keen to push these new SSDs towards the premium OEM notebook and tablet market and Samsung also expect its new drives to replace SATA 3Gb/s-based SSDs by the end of the year, we think that depends heavily on price. At first the drives will only be available to OEMs for installation into new computers and devices, however consumers will be able to buy a PM830 SSD to upgrade existing systems in the future.

We have not heard anything in terms of pricing, obviously OEMs will buy in bulk, however we are interested to see how much consumers will have to pay, all we know is what Samsung revealed in a press release, you can see it for yourself here.

In terms of storage capacities and prices we can confirm that the 60GB model has a suggested retail price of $149, whilst the 120GB model will cost roughly $279, there has also been talk of a 240GB model, however at the time of this post we cannot be sure as to whether or not this will be released, which obviously means we have no idea of pricing either.

All of the SSDs in this series boast write speeds of up to 525MB/s and read speeds of up to 555MB/s, these speeds are possible thanks to the use of ONFI synchronous flash memory, this is said to shine when transferring non-compressible data, which suggests that it should be very good when it comes to moving large video and music files. These SSDs also feature the new SandForce SF-2280 SSD processor and connect to SATA ports at 6Gb/s (SATA 3), these technologies come to together to ensure that boot times, application load times and system response times are far superior to any SATA 2 solid-state drives.

If you do not have a SATA 3 controller don’t worry as all Force Series GT models are backwards compatible with SATA 2 standard, however you must remember that this will have a detrimental effect on performance, therefore if you want the best from your SSD ensure that you are using a motherboard with SATA 3 support. Also if you plan on fitting one of these new SSDs inside your PC you will be glad to hear that they come with a 3.5-inch adapter, as you would expect Force GT SSDs will fit inside any laptop which has a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive bay.

Corsair suggest the Force GT solid-state drives are ideal for high-performance systems, we think that the 60GB drive would be a great primary hard drive for fast performance when used in conjunction with a larger SATA hard disk drive for storage, if you are considering purchasing one of these SSDs you should check out the full release over at Engadget.

Have you switched from HDD to a SSD? If so, what improvements did you notice right away?

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?