Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched 183
MojoKid (1002251) writes Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives (and may never make it, at least with the current technology), the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it's possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ's new ARC 100 240GB solid state drive didn't lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100's strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3-year warranty.
Re:Not a barrier (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends. If you have to cram a long term storage device into a small package then SSDs may win that battle regardless of the price difference. If you need virtualy 'instant on' storage or quick booting capabilities then SSDs win. If you need a very light weight solution the SSDs win. Price is but one factor.
Re:Cheaper drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yay! I can lose my data cheaply now! (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't understand. OCZ has a history of a very specific form of manufacturing and marketing strategy.
What they did for a long time was take a SSD controller that every else uses, and then disable every single data safety feature they can get away with so they can squeeze a little extra speed in benchmarks out of it. Then they actively market themselves as "fastest and cheapest SSD maker". The obvious result is that their drives are very fast, very cheap and very unreliable.
This wasn't about one model being off. This is their consistent strategy and why their returns were over double industry standard and sitting in double digits of percent. Their strategy was to sell a lot of drives with marketing hype to overcome the costs from massive amount of failed drives.
It failed and company went bankrupt and had to be bought out by Toshiba. And now it seems to continue with the trend.