If Alternate.de's listing is any indication (see here), OCZ is busy readying an update to its Vertex 2 SSD line, the Vertex 2 'Limited Edition'.

Kingston is refreshing their line of solid state drives with the SSDNow V+. The big advantage users will see in this generation of Kingston drives is support for TRIM. This should keep these pricey drives humming along smoothly throughout their life. The new drives also come in larger sizes, all the way from 64GB up to 512GB. The SSDNow V+ will be capable of 230MB/s read and 180MB/s write.

Never mind complaints about high prices for low capacities, some early stuttering problems, questions about life expectancy, and other concerns--the SSD market grew by 14 percent in 2009, shipping over 11 million units, according to IDC. And that's just the beginning. You can expect to see solid growth in 2010, and by 2013, SSD's compound growth rate (CAGR) over 2008-2013 will reach 54 percent.

As the SSD marketplace expands at a near-breakneck pace, OEMs and manufacturers alike are moving quickly to cover as many price points as possible.  One of the most popular portions of this market doesn’t lie with the high-performance, stratospherically-priced drives but rather with drives that offer the perfect mix of value and performance.  Enter G.Skill’s Falcon II.

Intel X25-M G2 SSD owners should be lauded for their patience. Don't believe it? See here, here, and, here.

Two companies were competing with each other and time to roll out the world's first USB 3.0 hard rive. In the end, it proved to be an anti-climax as one of those two companies, Freecom, failed to deliver the USB 3.0 hard drive that it had announced back in September. It has now pushed back the launch to next year.

Data Robotics is refreshing its excellent line of Drobo automated external hard drive enclosures. The Silicon Valley startup is launching the Drobo S and DroboElite. The Drobo S is similar to the standard Drobo but offers a fifth drive bay, allowing up to two drives to fail with no data loss. The new ‘S’ version also packs a faster ARM chip and an eSATA port to go along with the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports.

Imation has announced the release of the first external hard drive to use wireless USB. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive packs a standard 1.5TB 3.5” drive, with an SSD upgrade kit coming soon. The transfer speed are said to be a respectable, but not great, 15 MB/sec.

Synology has a history of making excellent NAS boxes, and the new four bay DS410j is no exception. Front and center on the spec sheet is support for Apple’s Time Machine backup system, a rarity on third-party NAS units.

There's no way around it - if SSDs are to eventually replace mechanical hard drives, manufacturers have to find a way to increase capacity at a reasonable cost. So far, every SSD vendor has failed on both accounts, which is why we're excited to see OCZ release a 1TB SSD.

We add Seagate's latest Barracuda XT hard disk with new Gigabyte and Asus P55 motherboards featuring SATA 6Gbps to see what performance potential, if any, the latest SATA standard offers.