Component maker OCZ Technology has decided to get into the solid-state drive business, announcing its Vertez series of SSDs that act as drop-in replacements for standard 2.5-inch SATA-II hard drives…at prices that give some serious competition to other SSD solutions on the market.
“The new Vertex Series of SSD drives are a premium MLC based SSD solution that are designed for consumers that require fast, rugged, and reliable solid state storage,” commented OCZ director of product management Eugene Chang, in a statement.. “The Vertex makes use of our newest architecture and controller design complete with 64MB of cache to offer faster transfers and superior overall system response times in a broad range of applications and games.”
Thew drives feature a lightweight alloy housing, have no moving parts (one of the key virtues of SSDs), and offer an estimated 1.5 million-hour MBTF (mean time before failure). The Vertex drives offer read speeds of up to 200 MB/s, write speeds up to 160MB/s, and an average seek time under one tenth of a millisecond. The drives consume 2 Watts of power in use and half a Watt on standby, and can be configured in RAID arrays.
But the best part might be the pricing: the Vertex drives are available in 30, 60, 120, and 250 GB capacities at $129, $249, $469, and $869, respectively. The drives come with a two-year warranty.
