Intel recently announced that Best Buy is now carrying its retail-boxed X25-M (mainstream) and X25-V (value) SSDs. The 80-Gbyte X25-M sells for $229.99 and the 40-Gbyte X25-V sells for $129.99. Neither of these drives is large enough to act as a replacement drive in most of today’s notebook or even netbook computers. However, they can serve as boot and application drives to help speed boot and load times. Nevertheless, the appearance of SSDs in retail locations, starting with Best Buy indicates just how mainstream SSDs are becoming. It wasn’t that many years ago that retail locations didn’t offer HDDs. You had to order them over the Internet unless you lived near a Fry’s in Silicon Valley, take a train to the Akihabara in Tokyo, or visit the Yongsan Electronics Market in Seoul. Now HDDs routinely appear in the color ads in Sunday newspapers and they are a routine retail item. Intel’s announcement of Best Buy as a retail channel indicates that SSDs are now starting down that same path.