14 DAY TRIAL // As we already stated a couple of times now, Solid State Drives are the way of the future, even if most of us still have to wait a while until the cost per gigabyte becomes more affordable. Until that happens, we can only hope that the technology is going to advance and will eventually improve the lifetime of the flash-based drives. In this respect, OCZ, one of the leading manufacturers of memory devices, has decided to join those manufacturers that have already introduced their SSD solutions.
What OCZ brings with its new Core Series 2.5-inch SSDs is better specs and prices, as compared to rival Super Talent. For those of you who don't remember, Super Talent has announced its MasterDrive MX series of SSDs in early May. These drives came with 30GB, 60GB and 128GB capacities and had a MSRP of $299, $499 and $649 respectively. These flash-based drives feature a rather impressive read speed of 120MB/s, with write speeds falling behind at just 40MB/s.
OCZ's new offer comes to top what Super Talent has to offer and brings more storage capacity as well as better specs for a lower price tag. With its 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models OCZ displays prices of $169, $259 and $479 respectively. In terms of speed performance, the MasterDrive MX series SSDs provide read speeds of 120 to 143MB/s with write speeds of 80 to 93 MB/s. To ensure that its offer is the best one, OCZ offers a two-year warranty and a 1.5 million hours MTBF for all of its drives.
"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."
Although the drives are still far from competing with normal HDDs in terms of price per gigabyte, they offer some impressive alternative, compared to other flash-based drive offers. For now, we can't really tell you when the drives will hit the market, but considering that pricing has already been announced, we should see them hit the store shelves soon.