OCZ SSD solutions under the videoscope

As the price of regular hard drives goes past silly and into the area of ‘downright painful', many enthusiasts will be taking another look at Solid State Drives. The Pro Class TV team gives the faster options from OCZ a once over with the HD pixellation tools at their disposal.

The idea of buying a PC without a hard drive in 2011, feels about as alien as the time when system builders began to leave out the 3.5″ floppy drive on the front of a chassis.

The advent of faster, more reliable USB pen drives heralded a new generation of computing and, to be honest, we've never looked back.

KitGuru's not convinced that we are there yet with the SSD, but a recent tripling of hard drive prices, following the Thai flodding crisis, has caused many people to rethink the whole exercise.

Almost a year and a half ago, KitGuru investigated what it would be like to try and live with a single 64GB SSD. The conclusion was straightforward enough. Instaling Windows 7, Office 2010, the Adobe CS5 Master Collection and a load of smaller games, utilities and CODECS, left us with a workable 28GB.

That system was left to run and, sure enough, around 3 months later the lack of space proved to be a pain that outweighed the gain.

Had we run with a 120GB drive, then the solution would have lasted a lot longer. You're not going to store your DVD/Blu-Ray collection or a heap of modern games on a 120GB drive and be happy for long, but it will certainly tide you over until the waters have pulled back and the hard drive factories of the world restored to full capacity.

Now what if you used a smaller SSD to cache data in front of a bigger hard drive?   In that case, even an older hard drive might do the trick – saving you from investing in a brand new unit that's horribly over-priced right now.

This kind of hybrid technology could make for a very interesting future – and it's something that OCZ scientists have been working hard on.

Here's a close up on one of the bigger/faster options in the market. Prepare to salivate.

KitGuru says: We always thought that the push to SSD would happen in 2012, when the next process shrink means that the 120GB drives drop below $100/£60. We had not anticipated regular 1TB hard drives passing the £107 mark the other way. It definitely changes everything. Makes the world a better place. Using smaller/cheaper SSDs to significantly increase the speed and life of an older hard drive is a cool concept.

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