OCZ Technology is expanding upon their Agility series of solid state drives today – which we crowned as the best value option in our latest roundup – with a new model it calls the most cost-efficient flash drive based on single-level cell (SLC) memory. Equipped with an Indilinx controller, the new Agility EX costs $399 but offers a raw storage capacity of just 60GB. By comparison, Intel's SLC-based X25-E will set you back some ~$700 for 64GB of storage.
Its sustained read and write speeds of 255MB/s and 195MB/s, respectively, aren't that much better (less in some cases) than the speediest MLC SSDs on the market. But SLC memory should still deliver much better random write performance, in addition to offering a greater life span and total cost of ownership.
The 2.5-inch drive features 64MB of onboard cache as well as an average seek time below 0.1ms, consumes 2W in operating mode and 0.5W in standby mode, and just like any other OCZ solid state drive is backed by a 3-year warranty. The company didn't disclose when the drives would become available but did say higher capacities might be an option in the future.