NAND flash manufacturers have been promising lower prices
for solid state drives (SSDs) for quite some time now. We've only just recently
seen some serious price erosion on modern, SATA-II flash drives.
Super Talent turned quite a few heads when
it announced its MasterDrive MX series of SSDs in early May. The 30GB,
60GB, and 128GB drives have an MSRP of $299, $449, and $649 respectively
(although online retailers like Newegg currently stock the drives for a bit
less money). The MLC-based drives feature a rather impressive read speed of
120MB/sec, but the write speeds lag far behind at just 40MB/sec.
OCZ is looking to trump Super Talent push down-market with faster
SSDs at even lower price points. The company today announced its new
Core Series 2.5" SSDs which are the most affordable, large-capacity
SSDs that we've seen to date. The 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB models are priced at
$169, $259, and $479 respectively -- the drives also feature a two-year
warranty.
And unlike the Super Talent MX SSDs, these new Core series
doesn't give up much in terms of speed to its more expensive rivals. OCZ is
projecting read speeds of 120 to 143 MB/sec and write speeds of 80 to 93
MB/sec. All Core Series SSDs feature a mean time before failure (MTBF) of 1.5
million hours.
"SSDs offer higher performance, reliability, and energy
efficiency than conventional HDDs but the cost variance has limited adoption of
vastly superior SSD technology, until now," said OCZ Technology CEO Ryan
Petersen. "It is our mission to deliver the highest performance products
to consumers at reasonable prices, and with the release of the Core Series SSDs
we have done exactly that."
OCZ did not specify an exact launch date for the new drives,
but given that pricing has already been announced, the drives will likely hit
the market very shortly.
