SanDisk announces Extreme SSD for consumers, customizable X100 for ultrabooks

For those looking to give a speed boost to an aging computer, SanDisk announced the Extreme SSD today, a 2.5-inch solid-state drive utilizing a 6GB/s SATA connection. SanDisk is quoting read and write speeds at 550MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively, and It's available in two sizes — 120GB for $189.99 and 240GB for $399.99 — but a 480GB version for $749.99 will be available later this year. At this price-per-gigabyte, the Extreme SSD looks fairly competitive with the rest of the SSD market, and the higher capacities are significantly more affordable than the recently reviewed Intel SSD 520. We'll need to wait to see some speed tests to know if these are worth the premium, though.

Of less immediate interest to consumers is the X100, an SSD for PC manufacturers that can come as a 2.5-inch SATA drive or stripped down in a custom form factor to accommodate the tight spaces inside ultrabooks. It's a bit slower than the Extreme SSD, with quoted read speeds of 500MB/s and write speeds of 420MB/s. Though not available direct to consumers, there's a good chance these will start showing up in ultrabooks sometime this year.