OCZ throws down on SSD pricing – 240GB at £149

We all knew it would happen, the only question was “Which of the major SSD brands would want to be first?”  The latest deals coming out of eBuyer show that the 240GB Agility drive from OCZ has ducked under the magic £150 mark. KitGuru hangs in a buffalo stance and ponders, “How low can you go?”

While it is possible that we're missing some of the eddies and flows, the overall picture seems clear. From SanDisk's flush out of old 128GB SSD drives on 18th May, the test of the month has seen memory prices shrinking faster than nuts in cold water.

The 128GB OCZ Agility followed and then the AData chaps dived in – which meant that even giants like Kingston had to react.

KitGuru has been writing about the ‘minimum useful size' for an SSD since June 2010. At the time, we used a fairly mundane 64GB drive from Crucial to see what happened when you loaded it with Windows 7, a full install of Office, the complete Adobe CS5 Master Collection, some games and utilities. The reality was that we had 28GB free, which is fine if you DON'T want to download films etc to your primary drive. We were ‘OK' with the set up for about 3 months, then the pressure all got a bit much.

On that basis, 120GB is a sensible size if you want to do some video editing etc, but you will still be doing a lot of file swapping back and forth to your regular hard drives.

Around the 240GB mark – you can really relax. It's a comfortable size.

It also means that top quality/performance 400-500GB drives will soon be down around £290, which means that you could have a ~500GB SSD boot drive, with a pair of traditional hard drives, in a system costing under £1,000.

KitGuru says: Even three years ago, the idea of a 1TB PC operating on 100% solid state memory for under £1k would have seemed like madness. Now, as long as you take a knock on the other components, it has become a possibility. Sensibly spec-ed machines with 500GB of SSD boot drive are imminent and we can't see it stopping there. Inside Seagate and WD, someone must have a very gloomy spreadsheet for ‘Future Sales Expansion, Revenue and Profit' hanging on their wall.

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