The field of Solid State Drive (SSD) storage has seen tremendous growth over the last couple years.  Last year the industry struggled with latency problems posed by certain JMicron controllers used in many models, but the performance, energy savings, and falling prices continued to lure new customers to SSDs.

Last September, Super Talent unveiled a budget SSD lineup with capacities up to 128 GB which use MLC NAND memory.  Now it has unveiled two new high end lineups -- the UltraDrive ME and UltraDrive LE families of SSDs.  Both lineups come with 32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB variants.

The drives post some pretty impressive read/write numbers according to Super Talent.  Super Talent rates the LE family read/write speeds at 230 MB/s and 170 MB/s, respectively.  The ME is slightly slower, at 200 MB/s  and 160 MB/s, respectively.  Super Talent reports Sequential Read IOPS of 13,000 and Sequential Write of 16,000.  Random Read IOPS is reported to be 7,500, while Random Write is rated at 6,000.

The drives are compatible with "all known operating systems including Windows, Linux, and DOS" -- though OS X support is not explicitly mentioned.  The drives all come in a 2.5" SATA form factor.  The LE drives come with a 3-year warranty, while the ME drives come with 2-year warranty.

Super Talent says a 128 GB ME drive should retail under $400.   Jeremy Werner, senior product marketing manager at Super Talent, brags, "The UltraDrive is a product that surpassed our wildest expectations, easily leaving most of today’s available SSDs in the dust. It is one of the first next-generation SSDs likely to entice users to upgrade their laptops to take advantage of noticeable performance gains in boot time, application loading, and accessing data."

The drives began shipping to OEMs today.