Solid-state drives are a great attraction to consumers, mainly due to their performance capabilities when compared with traditional spinning platter drives. It’s a common fact that SSDs attract users for the speed they offer at reading data, which is what PC users stress upon most often, yet the price tags on these products are a barrier against a faster adoption, especially among average users.

As already reported, one of the leading providers of Flash-based storage solutions, OCZ Technology, has recently introduced new solid-state drives based on the high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) II interface, which feature rather competitive prices. OCZ's Vertex SSD drives come in capacities ranging from 30GB to 250GB, while the prices start at $129 and raise up to $869 for the 250GB SSD.

Undoubtedly, the price of the 250GB drive may seem a little leveraged, especially when compared with a hard disk drive of the same capacity, yet it is a rather affordable offer. Just to make a comparison, SanDisk had at a certain point a 256GB that was sold for more than $15,000. At the same time, an Axiom SSD featured a price tag of over $6,000. In addition to the lower price, OCZ also advertises its drives as having a 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF), and that they are backed by a two-year warranty.

Other appealing solid state drives that can be found on the market today are Intel's X25-M SATA SSDs. The drives have seen positive reviews since they launched a few months ago, and they have proved to deliver great performance levels. The price of an 80GB X25-M is just a little over $500. Intel announced entering mass production with an entire lineup of solid state drives, the same as Samsung or Micron.

Another problem SSDs face on today's market is the fact that some of them are only available within a laptop. Many of you might already know that Samsung is offering its newest 128GB SATA drives in ultraportable laptops like MacBook Air and Dell's Latitude E4200 and E4300 mobile machines. The 128GB SSD option for Dell Latitude E4300 would set you back $460 compared to the traditional 160GB 5400RPM HDD.