Intel Lowers Prices on SSDs

For the holiday buying season, Intel Corporation has lowered prices and introduced a new model of Solid-State Drive (SSD) product line. SSDs can replace hard disk drives in a PC and provide a substantial performance boost for a notebook or desktop PC, making SSDs one of the hottest new waves in personal computing.

For shoppers looking for the latest gadget and for intensive PC user or gamer, Intel SSDs can help improve overall system performance by up to 56 percent. SSDs can replace or complement a traditional hard drive in a notebook or desktop PC and deliver faster computer performance when booting up, opening files and running software applications. With no moving parts, these SSDs deliver reliability and consume less power than conventional hard disk drives (HDDs).

"Every Christmas, consumers are looking for the latest tech gadget; this year, with prices dropping, the solid-state drive is becoming more mainstream and can make the single greatest improvement to PC performance," said Troy Winslow, director of product marketing for the Intel NAND Solutions Group. "With an SSD, tech shoppers can give the gift of a technology makeover that will help speed up, or breathe new life, into a current PC by just swapping out the hard drive for an SSD."

New suggested U.S. resell pricing for the Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD is now $199 for an 80 gigabyte (GB) drive, which provides space to store the operating system, multiple office and personal applications, as well as thousands of songs, photos, video and other data. Users can double the storage capacity with a 160GB X25-M drive for $415. The company has also added a new 120GB version of the Intel X25-M for $249, which offers the best dollar-per-GB value in the Intel X25-M SSD line.

Intel SSDs can be purchased at Best Buy or Fry’s Electronics nationwide or online from Internet outlets such as Amazon.com or newegg.com. An entry-level 40GB Intel X25-V ‘boot drive,’ at a suggested U.S. resell price of $99, is another option for desktop users that allows the operating system and favorite applications to be installed on the SSD for faster performance, while keeping the HDD for further storage.

Users can install their own SSD, have a computer technician install it for them or purchase a brand new system from HP, Lenovo and others with an Intel SSD already pre-installed. To make the process of copying, or cloning data, from a user’s old hard drive to a speedy new Intel SSD, Intel also includes a free cloning utility called the Intel Data Migration Software. The easy-to-use Intel Data Migration Software will help transfer information from the old hard drive, including operating systems, applications, documents and personal settings, in minutes.