Intel Forces OCZ's Hand: Indilinx Drives To Drop in Price
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 23, 2009 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The SSD world waited with bated breath on Tuesday as Intel announced the specs and pricing of its next-generation X25-M drives. The performance improved, sometimes heartily, but the pricing was the real story. Once these things get out there, Intel is expecting the 80GB drive to sell for $225 and the 160GB drive to sell for $440. If you'll remember back to last September, the X25-M first debuted at $595.
This meant trouble for 3rd party SSD makers like OCZ, whose cheapest high performance drives would now be more expensive than Intel's X25-M. As you'd expect, by forcing prices down, all 3rd party SSD vendors had to react. OCZ shared its new pricing structure with us that should start taking effect in the coming weeks:
| Drive | NAND Capacity | Cost per GB | Target MSRP |
| Intel X25-M (34nm) | 80GB | $2.81 | $225 |
| Intel X25-M (34nm) | 160GB | $2.75 | $440 |
| OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) | 64GB | $2.97 | $190 |
| OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) | 128GB | $2.27 | $290 |
| OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) | 256GB | $2.34 | $600 |
| OCZ Agility (Indilinx, non-Samsung Flash) | 64GB | $2.50 | $160 |
| OCZ Agility (Indilinx, non-Samsung Flash) | 128GB | $2.11 | $270 |
Intel's new drives should settle down at around $2.80 per GB; with the new pricing structure OCZ's Indilinx MLC drives will average $2.43 per GB. The 32GB drives are now gone and the 128GB drives offer the best value. The Agility seems particularly budget friendly as it offers most of the performance of the Vertex but at a 10% lower cost per GB.
OCZ's 3.5" Colossus SSD is also going to boast very competitive pricing:
| Drive | NAND Capacity | Cost per GB | Target MSRP |
| Colossus 120 | 128GB | $2.34 | $300 |
| Colossus 250 | 256GB | $2.54 | $650 |
| Colossus 500 | 512GB | $2.34 | $1200 |
| Colossus 1TB | 1024GB | $2.15 | $2200 |
This is not just a Vertex in a 3.5" chassis, but rather multiple Vertex drives running in parallel but appearing as one large drive. OCZ is aiming square at the high end desktop user for this thing and it's priced well. The Colossus 120 provides a nice price point between Intel's 80GB and 160GB drives. The 1TB drive is pure insanity.
It's good to see OCZ responding so quickly to the price changes. I'd expect Corsair, G.Skill, Patriot and SuperTalent to all follow suit. The question now isn't how much, but rather when this will happen. I've been told a few weeks.
Update - OCZ contacted us with additional information on when the price cuts will take effect. First off, it will probably take a couple of weeks for prices to hit the suggested MSRP targets on certain product lines like the Agility due to current stock levels. However, depending on the seller, you could see prices near or at the listed MSRP shortly depending on promotion and rebate packages.
We did a quick price check at Newegg this afternoon and the 64GB Agility drive is selling for $177 and the 64GB Vertex is at $199 after a $30MIR. The 128GB Agility is still at $299 with the Vertex coming in at $339 after a $30MIR. The 256GB Vertex is still listed at $725 compared to a projected $599.99 MSRP target.
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Akrovah - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
Actually, I believe that the next item on their list is the GPU, with the Larabee suposedly comming next year. :)Ryun - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
No price drops on the 30GB models, though the 64Gb Agility at $160 is a pretty sweet deal.Off-topic: Anyone else having weird page layout issues here using Firefox 3.5? In IE8 it looks fine.
deputc26 - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
Yes I have weird page layouts in ff 3.5 on youtube and facebook, I'm using ietab to auto-correct them.Goty - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
Is there any word on the performance of the Colossus drives? It would be interesting to see how the 128GB version fares against the new X25-Ms.winterspan - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
I just saw a Colossus review. The regular dual-controller Colossus drives, compared to a Vertex 128GB, have the same seq read performance, about 30% better seq. write performance, and double the random write performance. If you increase that to the massive 4-controller Colossus4x, all you get is another 50-75% increase in random write.Unfortunately, it seems like either the Silicon image RAID controller or SATA/300 interface is becoming saturated.
For performance, one SATA link won't cut it. Until these go PCI-express (or SATA/600), I would for sure get two separate Vertex drives instead and RAID them. Even on a run-of-the-mill Intel southbridge RAID, you'll get far better performance than the Colossus --- disappointing really.
superunknown98 - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
I think I would Spend the extra money on the Intel 80GB. It's only $35 dollars more, performs much better, and these days an os or game are quite large. The extra space would be used.fyleow - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
Too bad about the pricing.The 60 GB is still more expensive than the Intel on a $/GB basis. The 128 GB is a good value but I don't need that much capacity for an OS/App drive.
Guess I'll be getting an Intel SSD then.
holywarrior007 - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
Dear AnandWould you please say something about the new Lexar SSDs? Are these good enough for notebook?
Best,
Naveen
winterspan - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - link
Lexar does not make SSDs according to their website.ssdfreak - Friday, July 24, 2009 - link
Whatever happened to the Sandisk SSD's that were rumored????