OCZ announces 128GB SSD for under £250

Posted at: 11:46am 2nd July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

OCZ’s new range of Core solid state disks start from just £85 for a 32GB drive

Solid state disks have just come one step closer to being a genuinely affordable alternative to hard drives, as OCZ has just announced a new range of high-capacity SSDs that start from just £85 for a 32GB NAND flash drive.

The imaginatively titled Core series of drives have a seek time of less than 0.35ms, and OCZ claims that they have read speeds of between 120MB and 143MB/sec, and write speeds of between 80MB and 93MB/sec. Comparatively, Samsung’s recently announced 256GB SSD has a claimed sequential read speed of 200MB/sec, and a write speed of 160MB/sec.

However, while Samsung may be boasting higher quicker read and write speeds, the drives have yet to appear in the shops, and even the 64GB version (with respective read and write speeds of 120MB/sec and 100MB/sec) currently costs £451.14 from Scan. Comparatively, OCZ claims that its new 128GB drive will cost just $479 US (£241.21). Meanwhile, a 64GB version of the drive will cost $259 US (£130.43) and a 32GB drive will cost $169 (£85.10).

OCZ’s CEO, Ryan Petersen, said that cost cutting was going to be an important part of the success of SSDs in the future. ’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 Petersen. He added that ‘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 claims that the new drives offer ‘the performance and reliability of the latest SSDs at a 50 per cent less price per gigabyte than other high speed offerings currently on the market. For the first time, OCZ is putting SSD technology within reach of the average consumer.’

The drives are available in a 2.5in lightweight alloy case, making them ideal for laptops, and they will also come with a two year warranty.