News - OCZ introduces sub-£75 Onyx SSD

[HEXUS]

Lower capacity and lower performance, but a useful-looking solution for your next netbook upgrade.

Read more.

[kingpotnoodle]

Very useful to putting some zing back into an slightly older notebook... shame there is no 64GB option for < £130... or is there?

[Saracen]

Well, at £75 it may be the cheapest, but at £75 for 32GB compared to about £90-£95 for the Intel 40GB Gen 2, it's not looking like a steal to me. Were I in the market for one, I think I'd go Intel over this. The OCZ may be a bit cheaper, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good value for money. It looks more like false economy to me.

[[GSV]Trig]

Not cheapest by a whole lot when you look at the 30Gb Agility drive which costs about £10 more...

[Scarlet Infidel]

Well, at £75 it may be the cheapest, but at £75 for 32GB compared to about £90-£95 for the Intel 40GB Gen 2, it's not looking like a steal to me. Were I in the market for one, I think I'd go Intel over this. The OCZ may be a bit cheaper, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good value for money. It looks more like false economy to me.

I agree. The price/GB of any of the value SSDs never seems to be below that of the far superior Intel drives. When dealing with such small drives I think the extra 8gb of the Intel equivalent makes a big difference too.

I still think the 80gb Intel gives the best cost/performance/capacity mix.

[dangel]

Not that simple - we need benchmarks to establish it's 4k read/write/random capabilities in order to compare it properly. The intel's likely to win out on this though given it's track record but the OCZ in an unknown quantity. It's a shame the kingston 40gb drives were stopped - they were a bargain for sure (I have two) and as it turned out, rebadged intel drives. 30gb-40gb is ideal as a boot drive - my media center only uses 20gb of that anyway.

[mikerr]

speeds of up to £125MB/s

That's a fast way to spend money

[billybear]

You have to remember that most Intel Atom netbooks have poor SATA controllers limiting speed. There is little point in putting in a fast SSD in netbooks because of price and you don't get the full benefits out of them anyway.

Anyway... I am looking for a new SSD myself for my brothers laptop. I have a RunCore in mine which is blazing fast. He is after 128GB-256GB. What's got good performance with 150MBs+ write speeds and more than 200MBs+ read? That's what my current Runcore does.

[mikerr]

You have to remember that most Intel Atom netbooks have poor SATA controllers limiting speed.

Do they limit latency too?
Ignoring the headline grabbing transfer speeds, it's the random read/write speed that makes SSDs so much better than HDDs in use, not the seuqnetial transfer speeds.

[Scarlet Infidel]

Try not to concentrate too much on the sequential read and write speeds. They are only used or marketing as they are the largest numbers. Of course these numbers do help when loading things into memory or moving files.

Any SSD should have fast access times but there are large differences in 4K random read/write speeds. These are what's important when it comes to perceived OS performance in my opinion.

EDIT: I agree with mikerr (and dangel) who beat me to it.

[CK_1985]

Well it may not be setting the world alight but it's nice to see an SSD launch that isn't all about high-end (and hence stupidly expensive) drives - they still seem to be a worringly long way off from becoming mainstream products to me... Getting a little tired of waiting for SSD prices to drop to sensible levels, but maybe I'm just being impatient.

[s_kinton]

they still seem to be a worringly long way off from becoming mainstream products to me... Getting a little tired of waiting for SSD prices to drop to sensible levels, but maybe I'm just being impatient.

I'm feeling the same, the prices do seem to be coming down but far too slow for an impatient person like me!

I'd love a couple of ~80GB SSDs for my HTPCs but just cant see it happening for a while.

[Konata]

Why aren't there any 16gb boot drives being sold, I'd buy one for my desktop.

[Saracen]

...... Getting a little tired of waiting for SSD prices to drop to sensible levels, but maybe I'm just being impatient.

The exchange rate isn't helping. It's dropped from about $2 = £1 a couple of years back, to around £1.65/$ a couple of weeks back, when much current pricing will have been determined. But we're having another little wobble at the moment and are at a little over £1.40/$ last time I looked, a couple of days ago. If that rate sticks, expect to see more price rises to reflect it coming down the line.

And the implication?

If an SSD was $200 a couple of years ago, at £2/$ it was £100.

Now, at £1.40/$, it's about £143.

So we're facing roughly 40% price rises simply from exchange rates. If $ prices have gone up too???



PS. It's more complex than that, too. A lot of stuff is bought for European distribution, so we have to factor is the Euro/$ rate to get it in to Europe, and then the £/Euro rate to get it out of the Euro zone into the UK.

[Irien]

They say they're targetting Netbooks, but the (admittedly old) ones I have here don't take a 2.5" hard drive - that'd be far too cumbersome for a thin'n'light laptop. Have netbooks changed recently to take standard notebook drives? I'd have thought we'd be talking "plug-in PCI-ex" SSD cards or 1.8inch hard drive size...

[scaryjim]

AFAIK most 10" netbooks can take standard 2.5" laptop drives, although I'm willing to be corrected.

As several people have already said, it's the random read / write speed that will make the most difference to the responsiveness of a system. But of course, a second important factor is going to be: does this support TRIM? Anyone?

Aha, according to the OCZ website: yes, it does! It also confirms use of an indilinx controller, which I believe should mean reasonable random performance? As well as making a mockery of the article's "... There's no mention of any specific controller ..."