As commencement season comes upon us, a lot of your favorite grads may have already amassed a fortune in gadgets and electronics. But as 2008′s gadget of the year begins to age and the student loans start to come due, you can bet your class of ’12er won’t be running around to buy the latest and greatest anytime soon.

So we put together this little gift guide. Give them one last thrill, will ya?

IoSafe Rugged Portable SSD

Speed, security, and reliability are the criteria for purchasing any hard drive, especially an external one. The ioSafe Rugged Portable is a 500GB USB 3.0 SSD drive, and it’s one of the best on the market. It is durable and reliable, and will work even with 2.5 tons of weight crushing it. It will work even if it’s soaked in fuel, oil, water, left out in the sun, sunk in salt water for three days, frozen in ice, or left in a dust storm. This is the Glock of hard drives, and your data will thank you when it’s not lost in damage or failure.

It’s also a solid-state drive, so it’s fast to boot. Technical reviewers like Maximum PC have given the IoSafe high marks. It takes a sledgehammer to break one of these babies. The sleek milled-aluminum (titanium available) case also looks great in a workspace.

Warpia ConnectHD

This may be a better gift to give to the student entering college, but either way it’s a good one. The Warpia ConnectHD is one of the better ways to communicate online over a great distance. It’s a product that looks business but is all personal when you get down to it.

The ConnectHD lets you have live, high definition video conferences online while giving you the power to stream that conference to your living room television, so you’re not stuck sitting in front of the computer to talk to your parents back home. It enables more personal communication over these long distances, and it might help empty nesters, too.

The product features 1080p streaming, HDMI output to your television, a crystal clear multidirectional mic, and 16-bit audio. While you’re running the video conference from your laptop, you can stream up to 30 feet away to your television. Setup is quick and easy, but it’s PC only.

Turtle Beach Ear Force XP400 wireless headphones

For the audiophile who has everything, we offer this. The Turtle Beach Ear Force XP400 is an uber-high quality headset that, while wireless, will not interfere with your WiFi. The set features adjustable Dolby Surround Sound with virtual 5.1 audio, digital/analog connections, and adjustable bass/treble/midrange effects.

The XP400 also features dual Bluetooth pairing, allowing you to game on your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 while answering calls on your smartphone if need be.

At $219, they are an investment, but you’d be pressed to find better headphones.

MUNITIO 9mm Billet earphones

It’s hard to believe, but most people I see walking around, jamming to their tunes on their iPhone or other portable device are using the default earphones/earbuds that came with the phone/iPod.

Fair enough, but allow me, if you will, to propose an alternative.

MUNITIO 9mm Billets are machined from aircraft aluminum and deliver a clear, well-defined sound that outperforms default earbuds and similarly-priced competitors. They are comfortable and produce remarkably tight bass with little distortion on the highs.

And for those of you who multitask, there is a microphone built in for on-the-fly phone conversations.

Hope you’re all set with your storage needs.

The heavy rains that fell in Thailand this fall have led to serious flooding. The floods forced many of the world’s hard drive-producing factories to temporarily shut down.

The factory closures have affected several companies, including Western Digital and Seagate and some 40 percent of world hard drive manufacturing.

You can expect hard drive shortages. A few of the hard drives we’re tried to review this month — or include in gift guides — could not be sent to us because some companies have suspended their review programs.

With PC sales already slowing, this could have huge implications for the industry.

Interestingly, solid-state hard drive manufacturing was not affected, which may also lead to this medium taking off more and more.

When our MacBook Pro was new, we assumed that while a 120 GB hard drive wasn’t exactly the largest Apple offered the max was 250 GB, by the way it was plenty roomy enough to last us. Fast forward to two years later, where it seems that every few days our computer is constantly barking at us that the startup disk is almost full, Parallels runs the computer to a halt, and iPhoto was slow enough before we had to move all of our photos to our Time Capsule. Plus we hate toting around an external. There’s got to be a better solution, right?

It turns out that there are a couple ingenious hackers out there who have realized that the space your optical drive sits in is some very valuable real estate space which could easily be repurposed and filled with another hard drive. One intrepid blogger, Reid, has decided to throw his MacBook warranty out the window, removed the optical drive and replaced it with a 256 solid-state hard drive, seeing as they both run via a SATA connector. Check out his blog to see the nitty-gritty of what he did.

While Reid could have just as easily replaced the optical drive with a standard drive did you know they make 1 TB laptop drives now? solid state drives have many advantages over your standard drives. The flash memory inside a solid state hard drive has no moving parts, so they are more durable and last longer than your standard hard drives. Oh, and they’re FAST. How fast do you say? Reid found a seven-fold increase in speed in benchmark tests he ran.

The best part of all these shenanigans is that in the interest of bettering the human race, Reid is offering to help you trick out your laptop too. He’s posted all the instructions be warned, there’s some soldering required and a list of the $10 of parts you need to purchase from Amazon.com. Or for the slightly more adventurous, he’ll ship you the connector for $30. Or, if the whole performing surgery on your laptop makes you feel a bit queasy, you can ship your laptop to him with the hard drive you want installed, and for $35 plus $14 shipping, he’ll do everything for you.

We haven’t handed our laptop over to Reid €¦yet so remember these caveats: we don’t know Reid, though we’re sure he’s a stand-up guy, so you’re shipping your precious laptop to a blogger while simultaneously voiding your warranty. That being said, comparable services on other sites run $150 plus shipping for an install alone. Granted, MCE will perform a similar service and install a brace that keeps the hard drive from banging around, which might be important if you’re not installing a SSD, but it’s still quite a bit steeper than what Reid is promising.

Either way, with optical drives in notebooks going the way of the dodo, this just may be the life saving hack that will convince us to keep our notebook around for a little while more.