Intel announced Monday that it has shipped its value-priced SSD worldwide. Priced at $125, the Intel X25-V Value SATA SSD offers 40GB of 34nm NAND flash memory and targets notebook users and desktop owners using more than one drive. For the latter group, Intel's new SSD would be ideal to use as the default boot-up drive, offering faster read and write speeds than the clunkier HDD.
The X25-V isn't exactly new. As we reported in January, Newegg already had its claws on the drive, selling it online for $129.99. It was also noted that the drive does sequential reads of up to 170MB/s and write speeds of up to 35MB/s. Consumers willing to dump a bit more money into a SSD could get the meatier X25-M (80GB) which provides up to 250MB/s reads speeds and up to 70MB/s write speeds.
But for the cash-strapped consumer, Intel's new SSD seems like a deal. "The Intel solid-state drive is our top-selling SSD," said Stephen Yang, product manager for solid-state drives at Newegg.com. "This new value entry from Intel means more customers will have the chance to experience the benefits of SSDs, not just in notebooks or high-end PCs, but in mainstream desktops as a boot drive. This is the right price point to help convert more users to SSD computing."
Intel added that the X25-V supports the Microsoft Windows 7 Trim function via the Intel SSD Optimizer. Also included is the Intel SSD Toolbox for Windows 7, as set of utility tools to keep the drive spunky and out-of-the-box fresh. XP and Vista users can download the "enhancements" by heading here.
