Low-Power Price Point SSD’s from Intel vs. OCZ

Theyve been out for about a month now, at least in Asia: the $100-hoverprice Solid State Drives in their “Value” editions… the main competitors being OCZs 30GB Onyx SSD (although their higher end 30GB Vertex recently hit the $119 mark, as they just released the higher-cost Vertex 2 and Agility 2 SATA II 2.5″ models), and Intels 40 GB X25-V line.

These are both 2.5″ SATA II consumer grade SSD’s, which mean in the OCZ case, multilevel cell (MLC) NAND and 125MB/sec. sequential read, 70MB/sec. sequential write speeds… but for the Intel, means five-channel architecture and 10 4GB NAND flash microchips. The 25-V sequential read/write speeds hit 170MB/sec. and 35MB/sec.

In terms of power consumption, the X25-V uses 1.5 watts when active and 0.75 watts when idle, and the OCZ hits 100mW active, and 375mW idle… so for those remote solar grid intertie systems that want to start sucking data from the sky, the OCZ would make a clear difference.