eBuyer and Amazon compete in SSD price-cut-athon

When KitGuru broke the news that Toshiba was cutting memory production in the quiet summer months to help firm up the price of SSDs etc, the affect was significant and immediate. Now that the initial concerns about availability have passed, the industry heavyweights are back in the ring to take another swing at pricing. Email offers into KitGuru's offices this fine Saturday morning have prompted a little investigation.

From Intel's initial 80GB X25-M product which hit the market around the $600 mark near the end of 2008, SSDs have increased in capacity almost as fast as they have dropped in price.

While the world plus dog was expecting affordable SSDs to begin eating into hard drive market share by 2013/14, the tragic floods in Thailand last autumn created an early opportunity for the memory makers. Just after CeBIT (March 2012), we began to see some serious price competition, but Toshiba's recent decision to limit memory should have shored up the price. And it did. But only for a short while, if today's offers are anything to go by.

Here are the latest hot to trot offers. Are they good enough to tempt you – or is the SSD price still in free fall, so it's worth waiting?

• 128GB Kingston V200 drive around £49 from eBuyer
• 256GB OCZ Agility 4 drive around £146 from Amazon

It's unlikely that SSD prices are unlikely to fall much below the level shown in these deals for some time to come. If you're not in the market for an SSD right now – that's fine. But if you are, then there's never been a better time to get a bargain in the ‘non-prime' drive market.  By non-prime we're referring to the fact that the top of the range Vertex drives move data in the 500-to-550 MB/sec range, while the 256GB version of the Agility 4 is a 410-to-420MB/sec product and the Kingston is slightly slower still (but still much quicker than a traditional spinning drive).

.

.
KitGuru says: We now live in an age where you can construct an intelligent system with no moving parts that flies along in complete silence. Why wouldn't you live the dream?

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

Become a Patron!