Intel 80GB SSD price cut by one-third, still very expensive

Looks like Intel is giving some of its SSDs a more reasonable -- yet still very exorbitant -- price tag. The company has slashed the 2.5-inch 80GB X25-M from $595 in September to now $390. While a 34 percent cut is nothing to scoff at, that's still $90 more expensive than Western Digital's 2TB spinner, which offers 25 times the capacity. The company also recently discounted its 160GB variant 19 percent, from $945 to $765. No reason was given for the markdown, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize the economy isn't looking too kindly on solid state's dollar-to-data ratio.

[jamesxa Posted Feb 9th 2009 8:46AM]

It's not really fair to compare the price of SSD to a 2TB 7,200 rpm drive, b/c the performance just doesn't compare. I found that a more accurate performance to price comparison is to 15,000 rpm drives, making ssd only 2-3x the cost of a spinner compared to 10x the cost of a 7,200rpm drive.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 4th 2009 1:39AM]

My 80GB X-25M came today. For the past few hours I've been getting the feel of it, first putting it into my Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Nehelem and then into my 3-yr-old Macbook with a 1.83 CoreDuo.

One word: Wow.

First I copied my 22.5GB boot drive to it, which took 12min 56 seconds. The boot time on the Mac Pro went from 39 seconds (time from the sound of the chime to when the desktop icons appeared) to 24 seconds. Not a big deal really...

Fire up applications is crazy fast. Open up a bunch of apps and the open as fast as you can click the next icon.

Next I stuffed this into the MacBook. It only has 2GB or RAM, but I loaded up about 20 apps to see how the SSD handled that situation. I have yet to see the spinning beach ball and at one point I was down to about 19MB of memory. Smooth sailing. With the HD my MacBook would have been groaning under the weight.

I'm completely sold on SSD after seeing it it action. It's a game changer. Period. I got this from Buy.com at $360. Three days later it was back to $380. NewEgg still has them at $363.

As another poster said, all you need this is for the OS and apps. For how I use my MacBook I can get by on 80GB in trade for performance that makes this notebook blazing fast.