Budget SSDs to bolster market?

It has long been said that high prices have prevented the solid state drive (SSD) market from taking off, but the past few days has seen two major industry players start shipping budget chips.

Last week saw the OCZ Technology Group launching its first under $100 SSD under the name OCZ Onyx SATA II.

Now Intel has got in on the act and begun shipping its own cheaper product, the X25-V Value SATA SSD, for $125.

But with price cuts comes spec cuts, and to get the price this low means neither live up to the standards of the higher end models.

The OCZ Onyx has read speeds of 125MB/s and write 70MB/s speeds, a better balance than the X25-V Value's miniscule 35MB/s read speed and 170MB/s write speeds, but Intel wins on capacity the key to performance with 40GB compared to OCZ's 32GB.

Both companies admit these are entry level products and are designed for boot ups on netbooks and laptops rather than exceptional performance on bulkier PCs - but will this lower spec and lower price point encourage people into the ways of the SSD?

Marcus Schneider, one of the directors of SNIA Europe and director of product segment data protection at Fujitsu in Germany, thinks it may just do that.

In an interview with IT PRO, Schneider said: "Price has certainly been one of the major criteria for mass adoption because whenever somebody talks about flash their first comment is 'wow, they are so expensive'."

"We can prove in an individual case why even at the high price it makes sense to buy it but of course customer perception and emotions are a different thing... they see the price tag and [it] looks very high compared to the normal HDDs."

He admitted that the price of flash memory has not dropped as much as industry experts had expected two years ago, slowing down mass adoption, but Intel and OCZ have taken an inventive route.

"These vendors couldn't change [the price of flash] so what they did [was] create new products, with different feature sets, at better prices. The good thing for the market is that they have managed to bring down the perceptions of price tags, that is important."

Schenider concluded there was still away to go to get affordably priced SSDs up to enterprise storage standards but this increase in competition and reduction of the price point was "very much appreciated" by the market and would "help to drive the technology."

His thoughts were echoed by Nick Broadbent, UK managing director of DataCore.

"The issue (with SSDs) has always been cost, and as the prices have dropped so the interest has risen," he told IT PRO.

"I think this will begin to open up this market, and we will soon see more follow suit and see this niche disk move towards the commodity disk of the future. There is still some way to go, but it is a very good start and now at least a price most companies that need the highest performance for their high transaction application, can afford."