Intel gets more competitive in the SSD market
Drops price of 40GB X25-V to $125
by Lars-Göran Nilsson
March 15, 2010
IT APPEARS THAT the SSD price war has finally started, at least on the entry level end of the market. Intel has announced that it is dropping the price for its entry level X25-V 40GB drive to an affordable $125, which appears to be a pretty good deal.
On Wednesday last week, OCZ announced its sub $100 Onyx series of SSD’s, but at least initially these are only available in capacities of 32GB. That adds up to roughly $3.13 per Gigabyte, which is exactly the same price per Gigabyte that you end up paying for Intel’s X25-V. We’d rather go with the bigger drive, considering the fairly small additional cost.
However, cost isn’t everything and Intel’s X25-V series isn’t exactly what we’d consider a performance drive. If you’re at all concerned about write performance, then OCZ’s Onyx is the way to go on a limited budget, as with a write performance of 70MB/s it’s twice as fast as Intel’s X25-V at 35MB/s. On the other hand, Intel is offering better read performance at 170MB/s compared to 125MB/s for the OCZ drive.
Either model will of course outperform your average 2.5-inch notebook hard drive, although you’re also paying about twice as much for a quarter of the size that a 7,200rpm hard drive would get you. Then again, an SSD does offer that extra piece of mind if you’re unlucky enough to drop your notebook, something a hard drive might not survive. We haven’t reached the stage where SSD’s are quite set to replace hard drives, but it seems like we’re getting closer all the time.S|A
File under Memory and Storage
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