SSD Solid State Drive Market Gets Cheap, Fast, Expensive, Better, Badder

Fast, silent SSD Solid-State Flash Disk Drives present one of the most interesting speed vs price vs technology ramps I've ever seen in my 25 years of computing. Read/Write SSD speeds are changing, gaining as fast as production drives can be reviewed and then the next generation SSD and implementation arrives on it's tail. The digital camera market has been notorious for relenteless changes every few months as we went from 1mp to 2 to 3 to 5 to 8 and more megapixels. So too with the SSD marketplace.

Look at some of the varied Cut-Throat SSD drive capacity/pricing here - and note how Amazon is a good competitive pricing barometer on products of all sorts. As the SSD market matures, we're seeing different Performance/Price Tiers: Lower-cost SSD's with good READ performance, but slower writes - and top tier SSD's that push Reads AND Write speeds to new levels - At a price. "How fast do you want to go? What are you willing to pay?"

OCZ is innovating with a great SATA interface Core series drive SSD with mini-USB Service-Port built-in! This allows transfers, testing, reformatting etc - before installing the unit into a laptop - or as a great tool for a bench tech. SMART DESIGN!

More under the hood innovations go beyond speed improvements in SLC and MLC NAND memory - alot of performance gains are coming from 2nd, 3rd generation SSD memory controller chips managing wear-leveling, block mapping and optimized data transfers far more intelligently than before. Proof that it isn't just raw memory Reads/Writes, but the sum of it's parts that's going to lead to long-lasting, high-performance SSD's that will stand the test of time.