Solid state drives (SSDs) are now somewhat affordable for the user that wants to boost the performance of his or her computer. Today we are going to review the latest release from five different manufacturers (Intel, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ and Patriot), with prices ranging from USD 200 to USD 300.

Before going on, we'd highly suggest you to read our Anatomy of SSD Units tutorial, which provides all background information you should know about SSDs. All units included in this round-up are based on MLC memory chips.

Sixty four gigs don't seem a lot, but at least it allows you to come with a hybrid solution: installing the operating system and programs on the SSD and using a large hard disk drive for storing data such as movies, songs, pictures, etc.

In the table below we compare the units we are going to review. All units use the 2.5" form factor and SATA-300 interface.

Intel X25-M is an oddball with its 80 GB capacity instead of 64 GB. This "strange" number happens because the controller chip used on this particular SSD divides memory in 10 channels, each channel having 8 GB (thus 10 x 8 GB = 80 GB). We decided to include this unit in our review because we think this model fits better with a 64 GB round-up than with a 128 GB round-up. OCZ labels its product as a "60 GB" device but it is in fact a 64 GB unit.

Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review, except for Mushkin Io, which we used the price being displayed at the manufacturer's website.

In the table below we provide a more in-depth technical overview of the reviewed units. For some reason most chip manufacturers don't put on their websites specific information of these chips, so we are linking only what we found.