First SSD Under $100, From OCZ

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. unveiled the OCZ Onyx SATA II 2.5” Solid State Drive (SSD) Series, an affordable MultiLevel Cell (MLC)-based solid state storage solution designed for consumers looking to take advantage of flash-based storage technology. Offering a faster and more durable alternative to traditional hard drives in a cost-efficient SSD, the Onyx delivers reliable performance without the high price normally associated with SSD drives.

ocz_onyx_series_ssd

“As new technologies become available, OCZ continues to expand both our enterprise and consumer SSD lines, and one of our goals is to make SSDs more affordable to end-users. Our new Onyx series SSD does exactly that and is a perfect solution for netbooks, laptops, or home desktop PCs,” commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. “Designed to offer the best of both worlds, the new OCZ Onyx SSD delivers the speed and reliability of solid state storage to mainstream consumers at an aggressive price point that makes the technology more accessible to customers who want to take advantage of all the benefits of the SSDs without incurring the high cost normally associated with the solution.”

With a sub 100 dollar MRSP the aggressively priced Onyx 32GB SSD delivers an enhanced computing experience with faster application loading, snappier data access, shorter boot-ups, and longer battery life. Onyx SSDs feature HDD-dominating access times, up to 125MB/s read and 70MB/s write speeds, 64MB of onboard cache, and unique performance optimization to keep the drives at peak performance over the long term.

OCZ Onyx SSD drives feature a durable yet lightweight housing, and because OCZ SSDs have no moving parts, the drives are more rugged than conventional hard drives. Available first in 32GB capacity the Onyx state drives are ideal for use as a boot up drive or for mobile PCs and Netbooks as a quality hard drive replacement. Designed for ultimate reliability, Onyx SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time between failure (MTBF), and OCZ also offers a leading 3-year warranty and technical support with the series, making SSDs a more viable upgrade for users requiring ultimate levels of customer service.

Comments

The price is the more impressive part of this announcement: less than $100 for a 32GB SSD. We never saw that before. It corresponds to only $3 per gigabyte.

The specs are not the best ones you can find for a MLC unit: only up to 70MB/s for write, and 125MB/s for read.

The best prices we got formerly were $110 from Active Media for a 1.8-inch 32GB device for HP Mini, and $115 by Kingston for a 2.5-inch 40GB SSD.

Of course, for less than $30 you can find a 40GB notebook HDD, and for less than $100 a 500GB unit, but the trend continues: the price per gigabyte of SSD is going down faster than for HDD. We wonder if, in 2015, there will be any notebook or subnotebook sold with a magnetic memory.