Solid-state hard drives, or SSDs, have finally emerged this year as viable, though expensive, products. The great benefit of SSDs is the fact that they are rather akin to giant blocks of ram—sturdy thanks to the fact they have no moving parts, power efficient because there's no motor needed to spin drive platters, and very fast since there's no issue of the drive spinning up to top speed and seeking for various bits of data. Alienware is apparently the first of the gaming PC makers to begin adding the drives to gaming laptops as it today announced the availability of both single and RAID 0 options for owners building mobile powerhouses. The Area-51 m9750, Aurora m9700, and Area-51 m5550 notebooks will each be available with SSD options. Only the m9750 and m9700 will have the option of a 64-GB dual drive RAID 0 array. These models will also be available with a 32-GB SSD and a 200-GB traditional HDD. Lucky owners of these new SSD based gaming notebooks will likely get some big performance gains in load times and battery life. The upgrade won't come cheap however, as a single 32-GB SSD drive adds $500 to the cost of an Alienware notebook, and the 64-GB RAID 0 arrangement $920
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