It costs as much as your entire desktop.

After a redesign and six months on the burner, OCZ has finally released its PCI Express SSD solution.

Dubbed the “Z-Drive,” the new SSD product comes in two flavors: The e84 series with SLC NAND cells, and the p84 series with MLC NAND cells. Both variants are mated to 256MB of onboard cache and plug into a PCI Express x8 slot.

On the SLC front, the e84 drives offer the choice between 256GB or 512GB, with sustained performance at or around 800MBps read and 750MBps write, respectively. SLC is slightly quicker on the draw, and that’s reflected in the 16k IOPS to the 10k offered by the MLC cells in the e84.

The MLC-based e84, meanwhile, comes in 256GB-1TB flavors and tops out at 870/760MBps for the 1TB model. As we mentioned above, the p84s offer a “mere” 10k IOPS to the e84’s 16k.

The drives are available on the US side of the pond from Amazon and other retailers for $1560-$3370 USD.

Intel has halted sales of its new 34nm SSDs as a result of a firmware bug which renders the drive’s data inaccessible if users configure and then alter or disable a BIOS password.

While other memory manufacturers have been big players in the SSD race, Crucial has remained largely absent until this week’s introduction of the modestly-named M225 SSD series.

Crucial has been a long-time player in the memory market. Through flash cards, memory modules and flash drives, the consumer arm of Micron Technology has cemented a reputation for quality in solid state media. It is for this reason that many have been perplexed by Crucial’s lack of activity in the SSD space beyond a selection of sluggish parts in the RealSSD line.

But it seems that Crucial’s time in the slow lane is coming to an end. The recent acquisition of Lexar Media’s generous solid state portfolio (not to mention its manufacturing tech) appears to have primed Crucial’s ambitions in the budding performance SSD space.

The new Crucial M225 products are priced for immediate sales and can be yours in one of three flavors:

• 64GB (CT64M225): 200MBps read/150MBps write
• 128GB (CT128M225): 250MBps read/190MBps write
• 256GB (CT256M225): 250MBps read/200MBps write

The M225 line uses MLC NAND cells which we reckon are sourced from Micron (surprise), while the sustained I/O numbers point to an Indilinx controller.

Seagate is delaying its enterprise SSD launch until 2010 as the firm has stubbed its toe developing controller tech. [via]

Solid State Disks are poised blow the doors off of traditional storage media. As the inevitable end-game of the great bet on flash memory, they are coming in strengthening numbers to obliterate benchmarks, make or break companies, and free-fall in price. The revolution this nascent market is set to unleash will leave few questions as it makes a staggering rise to preeminence.

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