Published in Cloud

SSD pricing plummets

by on14 August 2014



OCZ follows Intel

OCZ is launching a brand-new series of solid state drives today, targeted squarely at budget-conscious, mainstream consumers and significantly drops the cost of SSDs. 

The move which is seen as being forced on the company by Intel’s own price cuts mean a change in OCZ's strategy. Last month Intel announced the specs and pricing of its next-generation X25-M drives. Chipzilla will sell a 80GB drive to sell for $225 and the 160GB drive to sell for $440.

The move meant that OCZ, whose cheapest high performance drives would now be more expensive than Intel's X25-M. Now OCZ has released the ARC 100 range and OCZ remains to be one of the only manufacturers that reports steady-state performance for client drives. The biggest difference to Vector 150 and Vertex 460 is in the NAND department as the ARC 100 uses Toshiba's second generation 19nm NAND.

OCZ is rating the ARC 100 at the same 20GB of writes per day for three years as the Vertex 460, although the ARC 100 is slightly slower in performance and drops bundled cloning software and 3.5" adapter. OCZ said that the smaller cell size of the NAND, meant that OCZ is able to price the ARC 100 more aggressively. At higher capacities, OCZ is able to hit the $0.50/GB mark and the ARC 100 is price competitive.

The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to bring costs down.

Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: