OCZ Onyx SSDs Start Under $100

32GB, come on, realy?!? What have you been smoking OCZ. Yeah I know this would make a great boot disk for a GUIless Linux, however most people buying the SSD are Windows platform people that would need a lot more than that to boot. I would only use a drive that size for my virtual memory.

I have Windows 7 x64, 3DS Max, Office 2007 and numerous other programs installed on a 30GB OCZ Vertex. I still have 10GB free. I don't know why you think only a command-line Linux distro would work.

125 / 70 is too slow. I'd rather spend the extra 20-40 bucks and get read speeds up to 250 MB/s. Then again, I'd just buy two or three and run a disk stripe. Not using these slow things, however...

You could install several Windows installations on a drive of this size, what the h4ck are you smoking n00b? with 32 gigs I could nicely install both Win7 and Xp with adequate room for page files and tons of pr0n

This wouldn't be a bad choice at all for a netbook user with an HDD (like I) instead of an SSD. I run Linux and it's really just for the internet so you don't need a lot of data storage, so 32GB would be just fine.

I don't like this article.

Reason - It's equivalent to reporting a new car for sale and stating how big the brakes are, but neglecting to say how fast it can stop.

Randoms please.

Not a good deal at over $3 per GB for a sub par SSD.

For like $30-40 more, you get a hard drive with twice the read speeds.

and 32GB is not enough. While it can work bot booting windows. it doesn't help for much else.

wow so windows boots in about 10 seconds instead of the usual 15 seconds (windows XP boots in about 15 seconds for me on my 1TB western digital black drive)

If I get a SSD, I want enough space for the OS to make it boot faster and I also want to be able to install my games on it. A ssd is great for gaming as you can load maps faster. (great for games like battlefield 2 where if you load first, you get first dibs on the jets and tanks and stuff)

I also want to improve the loading speeds and responsiveness of programs like photoshop, maya 3d and my various video and audio editors

(when working on a large project, you can easily wind up with image files that are multiple GB in size each and I will have multiple files in the 1-3GB range open at the same time in more than 1 program (especially since many of the programs that I use can detect changes in the file and update to reflect the new changed, I will have multiple editing apps opened, each opening some of the same file and each doing their own memory and hard drive caching of the data. This is not a easy problem to fix with RAM, you need a fast hard drive.

my current solution is to put their scratch disks each on their own hard drive (photoshop gets use of the 1TB drive, and the other apps get use of my 120GB, 500GB 80GB and 60GB drive)

I would love to have photoshop, maya3d and adobe aftereffects use a SSD while also being installed on one, but there just too small and large ones cost too much

Agreed, but still far better than just a few months ago! The light at the end of the SSD tunnel is getting bigger

Kingston SSD drives seem like a better value and better performance. For example, 64GB kinstong SSD for 144 dollars with 200MB read and 110MB write. Perfect for a netbook!

I agree with the comments about speed, who cares about the sequential read/writes? This is a trend that I don't care for, its not a good measure of overall performance.

Overall I find this encouraging, other drive manufacturers will take notice and build more products at lower price points. Its time for SSD to hit mainstream. Even Western digital is getting involved, although I don't think their claims of better reliability will equal good sales. Not at the current prices they're charging for lackluster performance anyways..

I too have a modest boot drive, I have Win7 x64, Office, avg, firefox, thunderbird, and a bunch of other small apps plus Heroes V and all the expansion packs. 15 Gb free of 40GB. Turned off the usual stuff and moved my page file to my data drive.
My modest 40 Gb Intel SSD-v with its measly 35Mbps write speed scores a 7.3 on WEI. It also performs well in gaming and other real world tests. I paid $100.

A $100 drive that kicks the snot outta any mechanical drive looks like a good investment to me. And its not about booting into windows faster, its about faster overall system performance.

over at newegg they have a patriot 32gb ssd that does 210/150 for 94 plus a 15 dollar mail in rebate making it 79.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820220455

or hey double the size for 50 bucks more with this kingston

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820139134

Both have free shipping and better performance than this new ocz line

I want 160GB SSD for under $200 before I'll touch one as a boot drive. My Win 7 install is only 4 months old I have 95Gb on it. That's with very little media. That's all on another drive.

70MB writes? normal 2.5" HDDs can do that...

pass.

I have to agree, to some extent. It's not Kevin's fault, he's just reporting, but it is frustrating for those of us who crave some really meaty information. I like hearing about new hardware, don't get me wrong. But in this case, I haven't learned enough about the product to be able to make any judgements about its worth. Indilinx Amigos? How does that stack up to their Barefoot controller? Like Vant here said, random speeds are much more important.

Also as matt87_50 points out, even the sequential speeds aren't that impressive, in particular the write speeds. A 7200.4 has much better capacity, decent performance, and is dirt cheap, for example. In the 2.5" form factor, anyway. It would be a lot more competitive in a 1.8" form factor though! Plus there are a few things that even a basic SSD like this does have over a HDD, like access time and power consumption. The real competition for Onyx is other SSDs on the market - including other OCZ drives.

At $100, this Onyx drive will have to compete against their own Agility and Vertex series (especially if you look at the MIRs on those drives), and even Intel's entry-level 40GB X-25V is only $30 more.

No. No no no. C'mon really... Will someone please smack me in the face and show me this VALUE!!
OCZ Onyx 32GB - 3.13/GB
OCZ Solid 2 Series 60GB - 2.65/GB and right now after rebate 2.15/GB

Heck the Egg even has the Agility series 30GB drives for $89.99 right now after rebate. Both of these are much faster drives than the Onyx as well. I vote that no drive manufacturer be aloud to attach the word value to any product that is not at least $2/GB. I'm sorry but a $100 price point does not automatically make it a 'value'. What next? a Super Value $40 10GB SSD?

So someone introduces a modest, entry-level, budget SSD and You guys immediately heckle it for not being big enough, fast enough, or cheap enough. Heck, at least they marketed it for exactly what it was. If you want 1TB @1Gb/s, only drawing 1 watt for $20, don't worry. It will happen. Probably within the next 10 years. Now kick back and enjoy progress like we've been doing for ages. Ask your parents what it was like to fire up the C-64 and dial-in to their favorite BBS.

tks but no tks. this is really slow for an ssd

The fact that you said you "could" do it doesn't mean nor imply that you have done it. Windows 7 default installation is more than 5GB in size. Add Microsoft Office or whatever floats your boat for third party applications for another 1GB or more. Tack on hibernation file typically 1GB or more and virtual memory file's maximum size of 4GB in 32bit mode or a lot higher in 64bit mode. My personal Windows 7 machines swap file for virtual memory ranges from 8GB to 12GB on most days. Combine that with the degraded performance of flash memory when you pass the 50% capacity mark.

Why do you think its hard to find netbooks with 16-32GB SSD's when Windows 7 came out? It's about capacity and performance. Average consumer will use up 32GB in just surfing the internet in roughly two months. They will not use the built in "Disk Cleanup" utilities nor third party ones on a consistent basis unless they are getting messages about the hard drive being to full.

As far as a GUIless Linux, have you seen some of the distros out there? The base install might be 5GB for Ubuntu/Fedora/insert your flavor here. Once you start to add on other graphical apps, I've seen Ubuntu with MythTV installed and no media balloon up to 20GB for all the support files and such.

So please refrain from calling someone a "n00b" before you actually know their expertise in the subject matter. Lay off the l33t speak please; your lack of maturity and inexperience is showing there.

You may rethink your standards later as more and more gets ported to "the cloud." Google's upcoming OS is reported to be not much more than a web browser. I wouldn't be surprised if a laptop could reasonably run on 5GB of storage or less within the next couple of years. It might not be the most powerful, but it could very well be sufficient and popular. Look at netbooks.

SSDs are still overpriced. Making a slower cheaper one does not fix the problem.

I heckle it because the same manufacturer already has drives that are bigger, faster, and cheaper.

For a hundred dollars I can get a 140/100MB/ps 1Tb 3.5" PMRD...
Not sure if just more I/O is worth cutting the storage potential down so much..

My velociraptor performs at this level and If I get a second one in RAID 0 I believe i will be faster. Plus i have 300GB of storage for my games

well... whatever it is, it's just nice to see a technology got cheaper and cheaper. i know this will push traditional hard disk even better!

Nice to see cheaper prices, but if you spend 5 minutes you can probably find the 30gb vertex with a MIR that will put you under $100 as well.

More SSD products is a good thing and can only help the prices come down.

I just got a vertex 30GB for $69.00 after rebate from newegg. It seems almost meaningless to have a low end model like this unless it would have 60 gig for around the same price as a 30 gig vertex. I doubt that would happen because the cost of the memory chips are pretty well fixed for now.

This product is all good and everything but I need a cheap SSD using a PATA connection. I am worried about buying one cause I worry that the cheap ones will have the JMICRON controller issue.

Can someone tell me where to get a good PATA SSD for a low price that DOESN'T have the JMICRON issue?

I'll have to hold off for a couple years. When a 250GB drive is available with good randoms, for $150 I'll buy.

It just makes no sense (from a performance/dollar ratio) to buy these now when you can run a quick raid array.