OCZ is showing strong commitment to be at the forefront of SSD technology. Over the past yr the company has released almost a dozen different series targeting every possible market, from affordable netbook oriented products to enterprise-grade solid state drives for servers and information warehouses.

They accept had a great bargain of success with multi-level jail cell (MLC) drives such as the Vertex we reviewed a few months agone. Priced at $230 for a 60GB unit and $380 for the 120GB version, these drives deliver an excellent remainder betwixt performance and chapters at their respective price points.

At the other side of the spectrum, single-level cell (SLC) solid land drives tend to sell for more outrageous prices. For example, those opting for the SLC-based Vertex EX should be prepared to spend well over $1,000 for 120GB of storage. Even the smaller 60GB Vertex EX costs an astronomical $660, significant that consumers are paying an incredible $11 per gigabyte.

That is a hard figure to swallow considering its MLC counterpart costs a more reasonable $3.80 per gigabyte and today'due south conventional 1TB HDDs are fetching as piffling as $0.08 per gigabyte.

All the same as you may take learned from our previous SSD coverage and comparisons, y'all cannot merely compare SSDs and traditional HDDs on a price per gigabyte basis as they are ii very different animals.

As far every bit SLC vs. MLC goes, at that place are some notable advantages to SLC retentiveness, specifically operation and lifespan advantages that are inherent to the mode each blazon of memory saves information (here'due south a cursory introductory video, but in a nutshell if you want nothing just first-rate transfer speeds and are willing to pay the premium, SLC based drives promise to fit the beak.

OCZ has been working on making this technology a bit kinder on your bank account. Their latest two.5" consumer drive is known under the Agility EX moniker, and is touted as the near cost-efficient SSD based on single-level cell memory with a price per gigabyte at around $half dozen.65 -- or 40% less than the Vertex EX.

The Agility EX series features read and write speeds of up to 255MB/s and 195MB/south, respectively, 64MB of onboard enshroud and several optimizations to keep the drive at height operation. In addition to this, OCZ claims the Agility EX offers improved total cost of ownership due to its superior write/erase cycle endurance. Only at $400 for just 60GB of storage is the Agility EX worth your hard earned cash? Read on to find out.