Sunnyvale (CA) - OCZ Technology has announced it next generation of SSD drives that are up to twice as fast as the previous generation. While first generation SSD drives had read speeds of 58 MB/s and supported write speeds of up to 35 MB/s, the second generation comes with a massive 120 MB/s read and an even more impressive 100 MB/s write speed.

And since read speeds have approached theoretical maximum of SATA-I standard, OCZ had no choice but to upgrade the SSDs to SATA-II, or SATA 3.0Gbps. SATA-II interface offers maximum bandwidth of 300 MB/s, so that should do for at least one or two generations.

Unlike the first generation, that featured only 64 GB capacity (and a price of $1200), 2nd-gen series is available in 32 and 64 GB capacity, while keeping the same 2.5" form factor.

And now, we come to pricing. SSDs have steadily coming down in price, with some partners telling us that prices usually get slashed by 50% every nine months.

If you want to buy this extremely fast SSD drive, OCZ states that the MSRP is set at $499 for the 32 GB model and $1099 for the 64 GB model.

If you remember the price of the older 1st-gen drives, you can see that OCZ reduced the price by $100, while offering more than double the performance. We wanted to check the pricing, but our search for these drives in US did not yield in any results. However, if you live across the Atlantic Pond, you can already buy them in the UK. Vadim Computers has them listed for 370 GBP (32 GB) and 680 GBP for the 64 GB model (http://www.vadim.co.uk/OCZ/SSD+Drives/). Yes, we know - price difference between UK and US hurts (which is also the reason why author of these lines just moved from Europe to Northern California).

Truth to be told, prices are still a bit too steep, but if you remember the storm that Western Digital and its Raptor created on the enthusiast market, you can safely imagine the same scenario happening in the world of SSDs. Within this year, SSDs will become a reality in high-end PCs and especially business and enthusiast notebooks.