Monster Digital is looking to capitalize on the SSD craze by branching out from memory cards and releasing the LeMans line of high-performance drives. Monster's press release claims these drives will max out at 550MB/s read and 515MB/s write, speeds that far exceed most drives on the market. According to Storage Review, these speeds will be delivered by a SATA 3.0 6Gb/s interface (rather than the more common 3Gb/s platform) thanks to a SandForce 2200 processor.

The other noteworthy aspect of the LeMans series is high overprovisioning, which is the difference between the useable space seen by the OS and the actual physical capacity of the SSD. The 80GB LeMans drive will be overprovisioned by 60 percent, which means the drive's physical capacity is 128GB. While it may seem you're just getting less space for your dollar, overprovisioning increases performance and endurance by reducing write amplification, which is a side effect of SSD technology having to erase data before overwriting (unlike traditional spinning hard drives).

The 80GB LeMans is the only drive with a crazy level of overprovision, though: the 120GB and 240GB models are overprovisioned by seven percent, while the 400GB is overprovisioned by 28 percent (all within industry norms). As for when these drives might be available, the word is sometime in the first quarter. There's no news on price yet, but Monster is showing off the LeMans series at CES, so we should have more info in a few weeks.