California based Super Talent Technology made waves yesterday when it announced that all of its latest MasterDrive MX SSDs are to be priced under $1000.
With the Solid-state Drive looking more and more appealing as the days go by it was only a matter of time before the prices started to drop, however the fact that this drop occurred so suddenly is quite a surprise. Not too long ago Super Talent announced the 2.5” 256 GB SATA SSD for a little under $6,000.
The MasterDrive MX is available in 30 GB, 60 GB, and 120 GB versions, which are priced at $299, $449, and $649 respectively, which is amazing value. Unfortunately, the affordable prices do mean there’s got to be a catch somewhere. The MasterDrive MXs contain MLC NAND memory which means that while the read speed is a fairly respectable 120 MB/sec, write speeds aren’t nearly as good as what you’d get with an SLC drive.
Super Talent does do an SLC version, the MasterDrive DX but you pay for performance. The 30 GB version is going to set you back $699 while the 60 GB version is priced at $1,299, with those extra few bucks upping your write performance from 40 MB/sec to 70 MB/sec.
The price of SSD storage is set, according to some industry analysts, to half every nine months with prices now entering the truly mainstream end of the market.
