240GB SATA III SSD hits £129 on OcUK

While some of the big players in the market, like Kingston working with Overclockers and eBuyer, have peppered the £100 mark with some 240/256GB SSD deals, those have been for the older SATA II technology. Old stock depleted, cluster bombs of SATA III product are now targeting the same area. KitGuru hits the foxhole and pulls out the binoculars.

We spoke with Intel recently about the technologies surrounding SSD and when the price falls were likely to happen. Naturally, this is all tied to memory processes – rather than CPU processes. In that respect, Intel told us, memory manufacturers are ahead of the game.

“Making memory chips is relatively simple, that's why they always seem to be ahead. It's much easier to shrink memory than a CPU”, we were told. And it makes sense. It's like comparing ‘making light switches' with ‘making offices'.

As the background pressure on process is to move lower and lower, there continues to be flat demand in the market.

Except for SSD. Which has proven to be very sensitive to price movement.

One recent ‘This weekend only, big name SSD mega price drop' campaign, from an un-named reseller in the Bolton area, reportedly generated over 5,000 unit sales. To put that in context, most resellers across the country and buying SSD in units, tens and twenties.

So what's the significance of this new OCZ deal from Overclockers?

Well, it is an Agility III drive, so it has a SATA 3 interface and delivers 525/500 MB/sec performance, with a size of drive that anyone can use on an on-going basis, alongside traditional hard drives, without experiencing too much constriction.

Two years ago, we famously conducted a long term experiment to see if we could live with 64GB. We took an old E5200 PC and gave it a new lease of life. It had a regular HDD for data storage, so we had the 64GB SSD for ‘pure system use only'. The reality was that the system was ‘very usable' after installation, but within 3 months we were under pressure. We replicated this with a 120GB drive and it took us over half a year to come under intense pressure to swap files in/out.

But, in the middle of 2011, we built a new rig with a 240GB SSD and a pair of traditional drives for storage.  Almost 18 months later, we're still running at full speed. It can't be long before the 480GB drives are regularly hitting deals around the £200 mark.

KitGuru says: The significance of the 240GB SATA 3 prices dropping closer to £100, is that these drives can – in conjunction with a nice fat HDD – give you a sustainable system. A PC that will carry on working, very fast, for a long time to come. Anyone buying a PC today that boots off a traditional hard drive is just plain nuts.

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