Solid State Drives (SSD) offer mind-blowing performance benefits for computers and laptops, but there has always been a serious drawback: they are pretty darn expensive. OCZ is changing that, albeit slowly, with the release of several "ultra-affordable" SSD drives in the 2.5-inch Onyx Series SATA II MLC lineup.
For less than $100, you could own the 32GB version of the SATA II MLC drive — a real head-turner when considering drives of this size and format were priced several hundreds, possibly even thousands, less than five years ago.
It features 64MB of onboard cache, read and write speeds capable of up to 125MBps and 70MBps respectively, and 32GB of storage space. Oh, and did we mention the price?
Wait a minute: 32GB, you say? What can I possibly do with that?
For those who don't understand the point of an SSD, it would be most beneficial as being your boot drive (the drive the operating system runs off of). This would allow the operating system to operate quickly and efficiently by utilizing the fast read and write times of the SSD. You'll get lightning-fast boot times, extremely fast read and write speeds of system data, and greater reliability. Also worth noting is the fact that it uses much less power than traditional drives.
As for the gigabytes of MP3s and videos you've amassed — store it on your traditional platter-based drives.
But while OCZ's 32GB SSD is priced under $100, it is still much more expensive than the spin-happy drives we have now: around 15-times more expensive. But, as we mentioned earlier, the prices are coming down.
The 32GB version is all that is available currently, but larger sizes are expected soon.
In the end, it's a price vs. performance issue.
Comparisons aside, OCZ's Onyx drive could be the perfect solution to getting a huge speed boost from your laptop or netbook computer without breaking the bank.
