OCZ 'Core Series' HALVES SSD Prices

I thought I heard a clap of thunder on the way in to work today. After reading this I believe it was the collective sound of thousands of early adopters smacking their foreheads and shouting ‘dammit!’

Regrettably my aging (but still jolly useful) XPS Gen 2 laptop doesn’t have a SATA 2 interface but this does make upgrading awfully tempting…

They have these on pre-order over at Play.com! I'm teetering on ordering a 128GB'er for my MacBook Pro... decisions decisions... the unit is still under warranty and I'm on my third HDD already because I keep upgrading! Gotta love the data storage industry :)

But this is the breakthrough we've been waiting for in the SSD market... I see a sudden influx of low price SSD's on the horizon, hurrah! Kudos to OCZ.

It's about time in my opinion.

The HD market has been relatively stagnant for many years now. Whilst developers concentrated a great deal of money and time on improving CPUs, GFX cards and Ram etc the poor old HD has been left a bit behind. Yes the storage capacity has regularly increased however the performance has had little change over the years.

I have been using Raptor drives since they were first introduced due to their improved performance but unfortunately they generate a lot of heat and noise. As SSD drives suffer from neither of these problems this is a big breakthrough in my opinion.

D'oh! Sorry I missed those :(

I'm trying to source a UK channel distributor for OCZ, the only disti that has ever supplied our company with OCZ is Enta Group, but having contacted them they no longer deal in OCZ products... hopefully I'll be able to get hold of some of these through our company. The hunt continues...

So it seems the SATA II interface is what makes these SSD drives fly.... thing I've got a macbook pro (2.33 vintage) that only has a SATA controller, and the original OCZ drives with only a SATA were quite a bit slower writing data, but would the fact the drive itself has SATA II help overcome some of the perfomance problems? After all, even SATA is 1.5gb/s with SATA II being 3.0gb/s, surely thats enough pure bandwidth?

A small word of caution. These drives seem to be experiencing some problems, particularly with older southbridge (input/output controller hub) chips like the ICH7M. See the OCZ forum at
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=88