Although things may not seem that way at the moment, we’re still hoping that the statement by a representative of one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world, saying that SSD prices will drop down to 1€/GB by the end of the year, will come true in the end. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s clear that the industry is moving in that direction, and that the moment where the majority of users would have an SSD in their PCs isn’t that far away. Another thing that speaks in favour of such prospects is Intel’s Z-68 chipsets, which openly promotes SSD as one of the best ways to speed up your system.

Although Intel SSDs are far from being omnipresent on the market, those who have had the chance to use them are certainly convinced that these are top-notch devices. When Intel’s first SSDs were presented back in 2008, namely X25-M, it was clear from the get-go that Intel knew what they were doing, as these MLC SSDs used their 10-channel architecture to score much better than any competing solutions based on SLC NAND flash memory. Their SSDs were made in order to squeeze out the best possible performance out of Nehalem microarchitecture. Intel has always been an innovator, after all, and the SSD field is no exception; Intel’s controllers have always been the best money could buy, forcing other manufacturers to advance quickly in order to remain competitive. The model we’ve received for testing this time is the first generation of Intel’s SSDs to include SATA 6 Gb/s support.

The SSD market is still relatively new, device prices are slowly descending into the plebs, but the entire process still seems excruciatingly slow, which means that it’ll take additional time for SSDs to truly become an ordinary feat in today’s computers. Speeds are increasing with each successive generation, but even if there are devices on the market already with mindboggling speeds and throughput, the same adjective applies to their price. This is best supported by OCZ’s PCI-Express SSD which we had the chance to see at this year’s CeBIT - its declared reading/writing speeds are just under 2 GB/s (not Gb/s, but GB/s, together with 200.000 IOPS). Kingston has been synonymous with the sweet spot on the market as far as the price/performance ratio is concerned, whether it’s their memory, flash disks or SSDs in question. This time, the V series has been refreshed with V 100 models, which are a generational step ahead, but also propose an entirely new approach.

The folks at Western Digital haven't been resting on their laurels, trying to continuously improve their standard HDD section as technology improves. The result is the new Green HDD series, with a capacity of 2 TB spread over three platters. In comparison with its predecessor, which had a platter more, the increased data density has not only reduced the number of heads/platters, but also brought some other improvements along, perhaps most importantly, a lower price.

Last year we spoke to WD representatives at the IFA fair and they told us that they weren’t in too much of a hurry as far as entering the SSD market is concerned. They also underlined that they have all the required technology to manufacture them, but that fact wasn’t enough to make them join the race that had just started. A little over a year ago, WD bought SiliconSystems, a famous SSD manufacturer. Their good standing as the leader of the hard disk market enabled them to expand to other market niches; by buying SiliconSystems, WD was able to provide industrial CF memory for servers and telecommunication equipment to companies such as Cisco and Ericsson. Although the device we’ve had tested first appeared on the market in the first quarter of 2010, the fact that only now we were able to review it speaks volumes about its availability on the market and the currently manufactured quantities. The model that we’ve received for testing is one of the three currently available with the WD SiliconEdge Blue marking. It’s an SSD with a capacity of 256 GB, with cheaper 128 GB and 64 GB version also available.