Unveiled last month at the Computex expo in Taipei, OCZ’s 1TB Colossus SSD drive is indeed colossal. The drive weighs 14 ounces, but is compact enough to fit into a standard 3.5-inch drive bay. Laptop users will have to wait for a smaller version, though.
OCZ’s Colossus drive doesn’t come cheap either. With a $2200 price tag attached, the 1TB SSD drive claims read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds of 220MB/s over a SATA2 interface.
But if you don’t want to re-mortgage your house for the 1TB Colossus drive, OCZ will also launch less pricey, lower capacity models. For $300, you’ll be able to get a 120GB version, $650 will get you a 250GB model, and $1200 will get the 500GB model, the company says.
OCZ also launched in April a similar 1TB SSD drive offering, but in a smaller form factor (with better writing speeds) and a bigger price of $3000.
SSD drives can deliver faster data access and lower power consumption over traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD) But like in this case, the price for such a drive can be prohibitive for many users. So until SSDs will retail for a much lower price, don’t expect the death of the HDD just yet.