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OCZ announces sub-$100 Onyx SSD series

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On March 10, 2010, 5:37 PM

OCZ has definitely been active on the flash storage front, releasing not only some of the best performing solid-state drives on the market but also a few value-oriented options. Currently standing as their most affordable offering is the 30GB Agility drive, which is selling for around $119 at several online retailers, but now the company is looking to break the sub-$100 price barrier with the introduction of its new Onyx series.


The new series uses an Indilinx controller and will debut with a single model featuring 32GB capacity and 64MB onboard cache. The drive is unlikely to leave anyone impressed with read and write speeds of 125MB/s and 70MB/s, respectively, though it should still provide a nice performance upgrade over traditional HDDs.

Like other recent consumer-grade SSDs, the Onyx is based on MLC NAND flash and features TRIM support to help it keep running at optimal speeds over time. Specific pricing was not announced, other than saying it was a sub-$100 boot drive aimed at budget conscious users. But considering the faster Agility series is already pretty close to the hundred buck mark, we are really hoping OCZ goes a fair bit lower than $99 with this one.

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User Comments: 31

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  1. I am in the process of making a desktop computer and I'm considering using a SSD as the system drive. anyone know if SSDs get much faster in a RAID 0 array?

  2. As has been stated 30GB really isn't sufficient for a modern desktop computer. Win 7 is maybe 20GB, plus another 15GB (?) or so for an installation of "XP Mode". With no programs installed, you're already in the red, as it were.

    This coupled with the fact that ,(thus far anyway), inexpensive SSDs do not write anywhere near as fast as a standard HDD.

    Obviously though, this is perhaps a "zip ah dee do dah" moment for netbook owners.

    I am in the process of making a desktop computer and I'm considering using a SSD as the system drive. anyone know if SSDs get much faster in a RAID 0 array?
    Methinks a pair of high end SSDs would, but no so much the cheapies. Everything gets faster with RAID 0, the question always is, "as fast as you would like", or maybe "do you want the aggravation"?

  3. New SSD's coming out every week, I think I'll wait untill they get faster with more storage and a lower price tag

  4. Hopefully a good deal will come around so we can get this for <$90!

  5. When I went shopping for a netbook I looked at what HP had. Their small SSD netbooks drove me to Asus and more hard drive than I needed. I like the "solid" part in a portable device. I like the Asus, but I'm wary of too much of a bump. This is a good size for netbooks.

  6. Two questions come to mind when I read about SSDs.

    What is the life of of the flash chips used? Number of times any or all bits can be written to. before they are found to be bad - unstable hi-lo state retention.

    How well does it compete - price and performance wise - with the the standard IDE to CF card adapters + CF card - take your pick of speed and capacity.

    To the guest who switched to Win7 and SSD - What is so great about Win7 ? You see plenty of motherboards on the market which support 16 gb or ran. Stupid Win7 won't even support 4 properly. To top it all compared to XP SP3 it crashes too freaking frequently. I have to learn new scripts for all the things I used to do on XP.

    It won't even allow me to change the scheduled time in a scheduled task. How stupid !!!

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