Five 2.5-inch hard drives at 500GB

SSDs have stolen much of the limelight in the hard drive world. Depending on who you ask, these high-performance arrays of flash memory chips either represent the future of PC storage or a major bifurcation in the industry. For now, however, solid-state drives are largely confined to the fringes. Although they're slowly gaining a following among performance-hungry enthusiasts who live on the bleeding edge, SSDs have yet to make major inroads among mainstream users, even in the mobile world.

Notebooks are about as close to home court as it gets for solid-state drives. For one, the overwhelming majority of consumer-grade SSDs conform to a 2.5" form factor compatible with all but the thinnest and lightest of ultraportable systems. The mobile world is also where the superior shock tolerance and lower power consumption inherent to flash-based storage pay the biggest dividends. And let's not forget that 2.5" mechanical hard drives don't pack nearly as much capacity as their 3.5" counterparts, giving SSDs less of a storage gap to bridge.