Intel Forces OCZ's Hand: Indilinx Drives To Drop in Price

Ok, I'm going to record OCuk's Vertex prices below to compare against the price drop when it happens here (at OCuk)...

30Gb Vertex = £109.99
60Gb Vertex = £189.99
120Gb Vertex = £294.99
250Gb Vertex = £548.99

All prices inc VAT.

:)
 
Venares said:
Should hopefully put the 128GB Vertex's around the £200 mark.
NICE :D
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But then the upcoming Colossus drive is shown as only $10 more expensive, so that seems to be the better one to go for:

This is not just a Vertex in a 3.5" chassis, but rather multiple Vertex drives running in parallel but appearing as one large drive. OCZ is aiming square at the high end desktop user for this thing and it's priced well. The Colossus 120 provides a nice price point between Intel's 80GB and 160GB drives. The 1TB drive is pure insanity.

Seems strange to have such a high-spec drive for only $10 more than the same size Vertex. Not sure if anyone can throw any light on that?

Nomadd
 
yes its max sustained rates might be poor, but considering it would literally double random writes and read's in performance, which are significantly more frequently used than sustained transfer rates, who would care.

Unless you spend all day unrar'ing sustained rates aren't hugely useful as a guide to performance. If the majority of things you do require random writes where you are getting 10mb's then being capped on a sata 2 cable doesn't really matter does it.

Ok, some people do spend all day unrar'ing, so don't buy it, for most people they'd see pretty large difference. With raided slower samsung sdd's I still have no trouble moving data around when needed, however I download to a normal drive to save writes anyway.

For your average user(and by average I mean almost anyone that doesn't capture or stream extremely high def vid using gigabytes and gigabytes of data a day) sustained speeds are for advertising bragging rights only, real performance is elsewhere on the drive which is not even close to being maxed out on the current sata 2 interfaces.

I mean Intel's brand new uber awesome drive for random read/writes would need, what 5-6 in raid 0 to begin to approach maxing out a single sata 2 cable under random performance.

Anyway, they are only marginally more expensive because, a controller and a case to hold two drives instead of one costs $10, its got nothing difficult going on in there, probably a $3 chip $.05 of cable and a $5 enclosure.

I wouldn't be buying even when prices drop slightly, wait for near identical drives with faster performance and significantly lower price to come out when production of smaller nand flash kicks into gear later this year.

The price of those drives will be cheaper and faster than current ones, which will only push Intel prices down, etc, etc, etc. With also much larger scale production of the chips also pushing prices down the prices will start to drop.
 
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going by the U.S prices the 60GB vertex should be 16% cheaper than the Intel 80GB which costs £171 from a big rival so that means that vertex should go down to £145. But the Gskill falcon is already at £150. I dont know many people who would buy the 60gb vertex for £145 when for £25 more you can get a faster intel drive that has 16GB extra space too.

Think ilyndix needs to re-think their strategy. If the gskill falcon can go down to £130 then they'd sell a lot of those.
 
clocka said:
I dont know many people who would buy the 60gb vertex for £145 when for £25 more you can get a faster intel drive that has 16GB extra space too.

Think ilyndix needs to re-think their strategy. If the gskill falcon can go down to £130 then they'd sell a lot of those.
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My feelings exactly, which is why I was stearing towards the Intel. Still, I'm not budging until Win7 final has been out for a few months, so no rush. That should give the other manufacturers time to start integrating the newer flash chips into their drives too, so like Intel, they should be able to chop prices back.

If things carry on price-wise the way they have over the last year, my dream of a fast 128GB SSD for £100 might not be as far away as I once thought! :)

Nomadd
 
Frankly I wouldn't buy any of them until they have confirmed built in TRIM support.

Intel has already screwed over their existing customers with their policy of not releasing updated TRIM firmware, so why everyone is running towards a company that has such poor customer support is beyond me.
 
they have already announced that a new firmware with trim support will be out before win7 ships on oct 22nd. The firmware is for these 2nd gen intel drives, no firmware with trim will be released for the gen 1 intel drives.
 
clocka said:
Think ilyndix needs to re-think their strategy. If the gskill falcon can go down to £130 then they'd sell a lot of those.
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iiyndix sell controllers, they have nothing to do with the price of nand flash chips and thats 90% of the cost of these drives.

intel are more competitive as for a similar waifer size they can now produce almost double the amount of chips. Their downfall is that they produce on a far smaller scale than the likes of Samsung. However a double density production, even in far lower quantities, is still very cheap.

OCZ drives might not be massively competitive in cost even after the price drop, but the new mem chip's, which will no doubt be the cause of a new revision of Vertex's sometime at the end of the year, will drop in a price heavily.

The 60gb drive is also the least competitively priced of the lot, and its not because the controller/drives cost loads, some but not that much difference. Its simply because, they can get away with it. £25 to some isn't anything, to others, its more difference than they can afford. If you can still sell loads at £150, why sell at £100?

Also for those that argue the Intel will only be £25 more for more performance and more capacity, the 120gb vertex is only another further £25 over that, for significantly more capacity. £200 wouldn't be bad, now the exchange rate is up somewhat.

Now assuming 80-90% of the cost is in the chips, and the new ones provide roughly double the amount of chips per waifer, assuming they had similar yields(they won't yet) and assuming they won't increase their profit margin for a while(they will) then you'd be looking at costs dropping to £110-120 for the 120gb Vertex's. Unfortunately samsung and co will only reduce chip prices a little, till they really swing into gear in terms of production at which point we should see some truly great prices starting to approach £1/1gb.
 
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im afraid you are wrong, the controller is a huge part of the cost of an ssd which is why the price of ssd's will halve when the new jmicron controller is released as ilyndix is charging companies a huge amount of money as there was only them, jmicron and intel making them, now samsung makes them and it looks like kingston is making them too.
 
clocka said:
im afraid you are wrong, the controller is a huge part of the cost of an ssd which is why the price of ssd's will halve when the new jmicron controller is released as ilyndix is charging companies a huge amount of money as there was only them, jmicron and intel making them, now samsung makes them and it looks like kingston is making them too.
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how much are they charging?
 
Hmm, I was going to buy a vertex drive after this month's pay day, but I think I'll hold off for a while and see what the prices do. :D
 
clocka said:
they dont give out prices to us unfortunately:( anandtech and articles about ssd prices halving once the jmicron new controllers out show that the controller is a huge portion of the cost.
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no it does lol, it only shows that they want to stay in the race with jmicron. it doesnt say anything about how much of the cost of the parts the controller makes up.
 
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