Is SSD pricing finally starting to trickle into the mainstream? We're not sure, but if the latest moves by OCZ and Intel are any indication, even budget buyers might be tempted to look at flash-based storage in lieu of mechanical hard drives.

Less than a week ago, OCZ announced its sub-$100 Onyx SSD line, and now Intel is saying it too is shipping a low-cost SSD. Intel's calling it the X25-V Value, which the company says sells for $125.

That's a little bit more than OCZ's Onyx, but it also offers more capacity at 40GB versus 32GB. The X25-V is built on a five-channel architecture with 10 4GB NAND flash chips. Compared to other SSDs in Intel's lineup, performance takes a hit, checking in at 170MB/s read and 35MB/s write speeds, although it does have native command queuing (NCQ) and offers up TRIM support.

"I think what Intel and OCZ are shooting at is a price point for the consumer," said Gregory Wong, a flash memory analyst at Forward Insights. "And it's whatever capacity you can get for $100. In my discussions with Intel, they're seeing good uptake of their 40GB SSD, but it's not going to replace a hard drive in a notebook."

It could, however, replace a boot drive, and might be the start of something beautiful (affordable SSDs).

Image Credit: Intel

We're not the least bit surprised that OCZ has come out with yet another solid state drive (SSD), but here's something you probably weren't expecting: It costs less than $100.

OCZ's new Onyx SATA II 2.5-inch SSD series looks to tackle the mainstream market by putting more focus on price than it does with raw performance or high capacity. Available initially only in 32GB form, the Onxy drive offers up to 125MB/s read and up to 70MB/s write speeds, so it's not going to knock out the competition. But it will make a solid argument for a netbook or boot drive.

"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."

Few other details are available, such as which controller the Onyx uses, though we do know it comes with 64MB of cache and serves up TRIM support.

No word yet on when this one will make it to market.

Image Credit: OCZ

Citing sources from hard drive makers, news and rumor site DigiTimes says that Apple's iPad could end up slowing SSD growth in the market place. Say what?

The reason, sources say, is because the iPad might create a shortage of NAND flash chips. Apple already consumes about one-third of the total NAND flash output because of the company's immensely popular iPod and iPhone devices, and if the iPad proves to be just as hot, NAND flash supply could tighten.

The news gets even worse for SSD fans. The cost of NAND flash has been the biggest roadblock in pushing SSDs into the mainstream, and the sources noted that prices are continuing to increase. That should change once the NAND flash industry transitions to a 20nm process technology, however that isn't expected to happen until at least the second half of 2011. Bummer.

In another nod towards the increasingly popular SandForce controller, Corsair today announced its Force Series SSDs built around SandForce.

"The Force Series are the fastest SSDs that Corsair has launched to date," stated Kevin Conley, Vice President of Engineering at Corsair. “We have been very impressed with the SandForce SSD Processor innovations in the months that we have been working with them, and we can’t wait to get these extraordinarily fast SSDs into the hands of our most demanding customers."

And fast they are, at least on paper. By combining the SandForce SF-1200 SSD processor with MLC flash memory, Corsair claims its new SSD line can race along at 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write speeds.

These will be available in 100GB and 200GB capacities and come with TRIM support in Windows 7. No word yet on price or availability.

Image Credit: Corsair

Sometimes a company just does something unnecessarily extravagant to get attention. This time the company is Patriot, and the extravagance is building a PC with 40 SSDs in one huge array. This feat was accomplished using 5 LSI Mega RAID SAS/SATA 9260-8i raid cards to connect up the 40 TorqX SSDs. The System also packs two 1000w Thermaltake power supplies, and a server board with dual Xeons and 48GB of DDR3 RAM.

We would like very much to play with this system, but it’s unlikely that Patriot will be letting it out of their sight. According to a questionable claim apparently made by a Patriot rep, the system would be able to rip a Blu-Ray in 0.9 seconds. Technically, we’ve never seen an optical drive capable of that sort of read speed. It’s possible this was just a ham-handed attempt to show the speed of the drives. If so, the array is able to write about 8GB per second. Yeah, we’d take that.

Western Digital's been quite the busy body today in the SSD sector. In addition to the just-announced MLC-based SiliconEdge Blue line, the storage vendor also just unveiled its WD SiliconDrive N1x 2.5-inch SSD family. Built around a single-level cell architecture (SLC), Western Digital says these provide a cost effective alternative without giving up a ton of performance.

"The WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs are the newest addition to our SiliconDrive product family, which has shipped several million units since the first products were introduced. SiliconDrive SSDs have consistently met critical OEM application requirements for high reliability, high performance and long product deployment cycles," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Satisfying the challenging storage demands for a wide variety of OEM applications, WD has designed the WD SiliconDrive N1x and WD SiliconEdge Blue product families to facilitate SSD technology adoption in a multitude of existing and expanding new markets that can benefit from advanced storage solutions."

Like the SiliconEdge Blue line, the SiliconDrive N1x family also features a native SATA 3.0 interface. Read and write speeds are a little more modest at 240MB/s and 140MB/s, respectively, compared to 250MB/s and 170MB/s on the SiliconEdge.

TRIM and NCQ support also come as part of the package, as does a five year warranty.

No word yet on price or availability.

Image Credit: Western Digital

Western Digital is no stranger to low capacity, high performance, pricey storage solutions, only up until this point they've always fallen under the company's VelociRaptor line. That all changes today, as WD announced its first-ever consumer-oriented solid state drive (SSD), the SiliconEdge 2.5-inch SSD family.

"The development of the WD SiliconEdge Blue product family leverages WD's extensive experience in designing and manufacturing highly reliable storage products and the company's worldwide sales and distribution network to accelerate SSD technology adoption by OEMs, technology enthusiasts, gamers and road warriors," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Customers who demand the ultimate in performance will find the WD SiliconEdge Blue SSDs exceed all their requirements."

The new drives ship in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and features a native SATA 3.0 interface. Read speeds come rated at up to 250MB/s, while WD says you can expect writes in the neighborhood of 170MBs. TRIM support also comes standard, as does NCQ.

In addition to performance, WD is touting the SiliconEdge family's ruggedness, saying the product line has "passed WD's extensive functional integrity testing procedures" consisting of over 250,000 of testing.

The drives are available now for $279 (64GB), $529 ($128GB), and $999 (256GB).

Image Credit: Western Digital

Following the 'better late than never' motto, Plextor today announced it will try its hand in the SSD market with a pair of high performance offerings, the PX-64M1S and PX-128M1S.

"We're excited to leverage Plextor's expertise in optical storage and enter the SSD market as it continues to grow," said Esteban Kim, Director of New Business Development at PLDS. "PCMark, SYSmark, and HD Benchmark industry utility tests scored Plextor SSDs high and we're proud to have the new lineup available to our customers."

With the recent spate of SSDs boasting read and write speeds well above 200MB/s, Plextor may be stretching things a bit in classifying these as "high performance." The 64GB PX-64M1S comes rated at up to 110MB/s sequential reads and 65MB/s in sequential writes, while the 128GB PX-128M1S sports 120MBs and 70MB/s read and write speeds, respectively.

Both drives are available now for $225 (64GB) and $400 (128GB).

Image Credit: Plextor

Another solid state drive (SSD) hits the streets today. This one, the G3, is from SanDisk, which claims the G3 offers “a compelling alternative to a 7,2000RPM hard disk drive.”

The G3 comes in capacities of 60GB and 120GB. SanDisk claims the drives will open files up to twice as fast as a 7,200RPM HDD, allowing for faster boot times and snappier system performance. The drives will allow read speeds up to 220MB/s, and write speeds up to 120MB/s.

SanDisk uses a proprietary smart flash management system, called ExtremeFFS, to accelerate random write performance, which SanDisk says increases performance and endurance of the G3. SanDisk estimates the 120GB drive can endure up to 80TB of data written to it during its lifetime. This, plus “rigorous shock and vibration testing”, allows SanDisk to offer the drives with 10-year limited warranties.

The G3 drives are Windows 7 certified, and compatible with XP and Vista, as well as Linux and Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard.

As with all other SSD offerings of late, this new technology doesn’t come cheap. The 60GB drive will cost you $229.99, while the 120GB drive will set you back $399.99.

Image Credit: SanDisk

Kingston this week introduced its second generation SSDNow V Series the company says is targeted towards mainstream users. Kingston also claims these second-gen drives offer higher performance than their predecessors, while also boasting TRIM support.

"Kingston has really increased the performance on the new second generation SSDNow V Series drive without raising the price. A first-generation SSDNow V Series 64GB bundle upgrade kit can be found for about $150 (U.S.) at retailers and e-tailers so maintaining pricing will be huge for our customers," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. "By bundling together all of the software, hardware and step-by-step instructions with the drive, we make it easy for everyday users to upgrade with an SSD. The addition of TRIM support is a key benefit because it enables the SSD to maintain optimal performance throughout its lifespan."

The new drives will ship in 30GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities with varying degrees of performance. On the lower end, the 30GB model read speeds up to 180MB/s and writes up to 50MB/s. Both the 64GB and 128GB more than double the write speeds at 110MB/s and 160MB/s respectively, while upping the read speed to 200MB/s.

All drives come with Acronis True Image, while those in the desktop bundle also include a 3.5-inch mounting bracket and SATA data and power cable extenders. The netbook bundle tosses in a 2.5-inch USB SATA external enclosure.

Most of these drives and bundles will start shipping next week with pricing ranging from $110 to $377.

Image Credit: Kingston