It’s become obvious to me over the past year that our standard hard drives is one of the reasons our computers remain slow during some heavy-duty work. On my own PC, I have a fast HDD, but even copying a 10GB folder will render the PC slow for the entire duration. And that’s on a nice Quad-Core machine with 4GB of RAM! That’s why SSDs are likely to be the future, and why interest is high.
Though I haven’t played around with SSDs myself, I’ve seen demos at conferences that have been extremely impressive, especially if you pair a few together in RAID. Copying a file at an actual 1GB/s? Yes, please! The problem a year ago though, was that any SSD was far, far too expensive. Luckily, prices are dropping at a record pace, and some of them are actually becoming somewhat affordable, like OCZ’s Core Series V2.
Our friends at DailyTech happened to notice that NewEgg is now stocking these drives, and the 60GB model is currently selling for $239 after MIR… much easier to stomach than what it would have been just a few months ago. The V2 boasts read speeds of 170 MB/s with write speeds of 98 MB/s… very impressive. I’ll still sit back and wait for prices to drop even further, but it’s going to be a great day when we can all fill up our own desktops with such drives. It’s only a matter of time.
For comparison, original 64GB Core Series SSD (OCZSSD2-1C64G) is priced at $264 on Newegg. Like its newer brother, the older model also comes with a $60 manufacturer rebate which drops the price to $204. The older 64GB SSD feature slower read and write speeds of 143MB/sec and 93MB/sec respectively. It also lacks the built-in mini-USB port for firmware upgrades.