OCZ Technology this week unveiled its new family of solid-state drives (SSDs) that are aimed at customers in budget who want to enjoy the benefits of fast flash-based storage, but are not ready to pay a large sum. The Agility lineup of SSDs does not use internal RAID 0 to boost performance, like OCZ Apex does, but also has slightly lower performance, yet, potentially higher reliability.

“The new Agility Series of SSDs are the latest addition to the OCZ lineup of solid-state drives and are designed for cost-conscious consumers seeking the performance and reliability benefits of SSDs at an aggressive price. The new Agility Series drives make use of cache to deliver better performance over a wide range of functions and applications, all at a price point that makes sense for everyday users,” said Ryan Edwards, director of product management at the OCZ Technology Group.

The new OCZ Agility 2.5” solid-state drives are available in 30GB, 60GB and 120GB capacities and feature 64MB of onboard cache and a controller from Indilinx. The new family dumps internal RAID stripe design in order to improve reliability and decrease design complexity of the new SSDs, however, performance of the new drives is slightly lower write speed compared to that of OCZ Apex line, which was introduced early this year, that utilizes internal RAID 0.

OCZ Agility is compatible with Serial ATA-300 bus and have 1.5 million hour mean time between failure (MTBF).

Online store Ncix.com sells OCZ Agility solid-state drives for $148, $229 and $379 for 30GB, 60GB and 120GB versions, respectively.

Tags: OCZ, SSD