Hitachi and Intel are making waves this week, with one company debuting speedy solid state drives and the other making pre-holiday price cuts. And both moves bode well for green computing, in both the enterprise and consumer realms.

Hitachi debuted a new line of 2.5-inch, enterprise-grade SSDs called Ultrastar SSD400S, which was developed in conjunction with Intel and can read data at 535 megabytes per second (MB/s).  And in what’s becoming increasingly common in high-performance models, the new drives can store data at nearly the same rate with a write speed of 500 MB/s.

The drive’s blistering performance is attributed, in part, to 34-nanometer (nm), single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) benchmarking puts the drive at 46,000 IOPS (write) and 13,000 IOPS (read). And underscoring the IT industry’s growing focus on energy efficiency, Hitachi rates its SSDs’ power consumption at 5.5 watts and offers a  8,360 IOPS/Watt power efficiency metric.

Hitachi’s Ultrastar SSD400S will be available in 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB capacities, and in both serial-attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. The company expects to begin volume shipments in the first half of 2011.

Intel, on the other hand, went on a price slashing spree. The company lowered prices on its X25 range of consumer SSDs. The starter 40 GB version (X25-V) now rings up at just under $100, while the 80 GB and 160 GB X25-M drives sell for $199 and $415, respectively. Intel also introduced a new 120GB X25-M model, which slots neatly between the latter at $249. The drives are available now.