OCZ has another flash memory product ready for market, this time a collection of high-speed solid-state drives, its 2.5-inch Vertex series. The drives, available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB sizes, are supposedly capable of read speeds as high as 200MB per second and writes up to 160MB/s. Those specs make the drives comparable in performance to hard disk speeds. Part of the performance comes from the included 64MB RAM buffer integrated into the drives, larger than normally found on hard disks, allowing the drive firmware to optimize its reads and writes to the flash memory.

While most users of SSDs are laptop owners, buying the drives pre-installed in systems like the MacBook Air, there's no reason why you can't take an existing hard disk-based system and swap the drive out with a new SSD. The only requirement is that the drive supports the same interface, which is this case (as it will be for many modern systems) is SATA II. This might be a really attractive option for laptops, as the Vertex drives use only two watts of power when in full operation and half a watt in standby. The Vertex line is available now, ranging in price from $129 to $869.

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