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

They take had a great bargain of success with multi-level cell (MLC) drives such as the Vertex we reviewed a few months ago. Priced at $230 for a 60GB unit of measurement and $380 for the 120GB version, these drives deliver an first-class residuum betwixt functioning and chapters at their respective price points.

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

That is a hard effigy to eat considering its MLC counterpart costs a more than reasonable $iii.80 per gigabyte and today'southward conventional 1TB HDDs are fetching as niggling as $0.08 per gigabyte.

However as y'all may take learned from our previous SSD coverage and comparisons, you cannot simply compare SSDs and traditional HDDs on a cost per gigabyte ground as they are ii very different animals.

As far as SLC vs. MLC goes, there are some notable advantages to SLC memory, specifically performance and lifespan advantages that are inherent to the way each type of memory saves data (here's a brief introductory video, but in a nutshell if you desire nothing but first-charge per unit transfer speeds and are willing to pay the premium, SLC based drives promise to fit the bill.

OCZ has been working on making this technology a scrap kinder on your banking company account. Their latest ii.5" consumer drive is known under the Agility EX moniker, and is touted as the near toll-efficient SSD based on single-level jail cell memory with a cost per gigabyte at around $six.65 -- or twoscore% less than the Vertex EX.

The Agility EX series features read and write speeds of up to 255MB/s and 195MB/s, respectively, 64MB of onboard cache and several optimizations to go on the drive at summit performance. In addition to this, OCZ claims the Agility EX offers improved total cost of buying due to its superior write/erase cycle endurance. Merely at $400 for just 60GB of storage is the Agility EX worth your hard earned cash? Read on to discover out.