14 DAY TRIAL // Even though OCZ has recently finished acquiring SSD controller manufacturer Indilinx, the San Jose, California, company keeps on releasing one SandForce-based drive after the other, and the next such storage device to see the light of day will be called the Solid 3.
Just like the recently released Agility 3 and the Vertex 3, this drive is also built on a second-generation SandForce controller, the SF-2281 to be much more precise.
However, compared to the other two drives, the Solid 3 will feature a lower retail price and will only be available in two variants, one that will feature 60GB of storage capacity and one which can house up to 120GB of data.
The lower pricing of the OCZ Solid 3 was achieved at the expense of performance, as the drive can “only” achieve a maximum theoretical sequential read speed of 500MB/s, while its sequential write speed is rated at 450MB/s.
Furthermore, random 4K read performance is estimated at about 20,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
To put things in perspective, the Vertex 3 SSD family can achieve 4KB random reads of up to 50,000 IOPS, while the maximum sequential read and write speeds are estimated at 550MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively.
The main limiting factor in the case of the Solid 3 is the reduced number of channels that are populated with NAND Flash memory chips, but even so its performance is well above what other SSDs can deliver.
As far as pricing is concerned, the 60GB version of the Solid 3 will be available for 109€, while the 120GB version will be priced at 199€.
The 60GB version of the Agility 3 is right now priced at 119.90€, while the 120GB model retails for 214.90 €. The 120GB Vertex 3 drives has a retail price of 231.57€. (via ComputerBase)