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.
