Just in time for the holiday buying season, Intel has lowered prices and introduced a new model of Intel Solid-State Drive (SSD) product line.

Intel claims that its SSDs can help improve overall system performance by up to 56 percent. SSDs can replace or complement a traditional hard drive in a notebook or desktop PC and deliver noticeably faster computer performance when booting up, opening files and running software applications.

Mainstream SATA SSD is now $199 for an 80 gigabyte (GB) drive. Users can double the storage capacity with a 160GB X25-M drive for $415. The company has also added a new 120GB version of the Intel X25-M for $249, which offers the best dollar-per-GB value in the Intel X25-M SSD line.

Intel SSDs can be purchased at Best Buy or Fry?s Electronics in the U.S. or online from Internet outlets such as Amazon.com or newegg.com. An entry-level 40GB Intel X25-V "boot drive," at a suggested U.S. resell price of $99, is another option for desktop users that allows the operating system and favorite applications to be installed on the SSD for faster performance, while keeping the HDD for further storage.

To make the process of copying, or cloning data, from a user?s old hard drive to a speedy new Intel SSD, Intel also includes a free cloning utility called the Intel Data Migration Software. The software will help transfer information from the old hard drive, including operating systems, applications, documents and personal settings, in just minutes. It can be downloaded free of charge at www.intel.com/go/ssdinstallation.