Solid-state drives have a lot going for them. They're thinner, faster, more efficient and longer lasting than most traditional spinning hard disks — yet high prices keeps most folks steering well clear.

US Flash memory maker Super Talent Technology plans to mix things up by releasing a pair of SSDs this week that won't send customers to the poor house.

The MasterDrive LX line comes in 64GB and 128GB versions and will cost about $180 and $300 respectively. The 2.5-inch drives are built with NAND Flash and use a SATA-II 3Gbps interface.

Related stories

• Super Talent pimps solid-gold USB stick bling thing
• Iomega, LaCie revamp telly-friendly external hard drives
• How many terabytes can you fit on a 2.5-inch hard drive?
• Michael Dell says: If I could do it all again...
• Toshiba unwraps 256GB 2.5in SSD
• Sony shows first ultra-portable laptop with on-board Blu-ray
• Is flash a cache or pretend disk drive?
• WD's 2.5in HDDs to hit 1TB by early 2010
• World's slimmest 256GB SSD unveiled
• Cisco's mushy 'spin-in' deals undermine acquisition heroics

At about $2.33 per gigabyte, they're relatively cheap compared to SSDs with a similar capacity.

The catch is they're certainly not the zippiest SSDs ever made. Both versions offer a max read speed of 100MB/s and a write speed of only 40MB/s. That actually puts them on par or below regular SATA drives. Strike one benefit of using SSDs, but it still leaves superior size, durability, and battery life — all good things to have for notebook storage.

Super Talent expects to begin shipping both models this week.

More comments…