OCZ Gets Affordable with Agility Series 2.5-inch SSDs

OCZ Technology has introduced a new Agility series of 2.5-inch SATA II solid-state drives that can be used as drop-in upgrades...and they're affordable.

Lots of folks are considering transitioning to solid-state drives (SSDs) to increase battery life in their notebook computers…or simply to have the piece of mind knowing that bumps and shocks aren’t going to destroy data by causing a head crash or other failure of moving and spinning parts. Storage developer OCZ Technology has been pushing out SSD drives for some time, but for the most part they’ve been eyeing the high end of the market, producing drives aimed at servers and other high-performance applications. Now as SSDs are getting increasingly mainstream OCZ is too: today the company announced its new Agility series of solid state drives at consumer-friendly prices.

“The new Agility Series of SSDs are the latest addition to the OCZ lineup of solid state drives and are designed for cost-conscious consumers seeking the performance and reliability benefits of SSDs at an aggressive price,” commented OCZ’s director of product management Ryan Edwards, in a statement. “The new Agility Series drives make use of cache to deliver better performance over a wide range of functions and applications, all at a price point that makes sense for everyday users.”

The Agility drives sport capacities of 30, 60, and 120 GB, along with 64 MB of onboard cache to boost performance. The drives support read speeds of up to 230 MB/s and write speeds of 135MB/s (with sustained writes of 80 MB/s), and have an estimates mean time before failure of some 1.5 million hours—but OCZ is throwing in a two-year warranty just in case.

OCZ expects the drives will be available in July; retail prices should range from about $130 for the 30 GB edition up to about $350 for the 120 GB edition.