We know how fast SSDs are compared to their conventional hard drive counterparts. And we also know how incredibly expensive they are, but with sales like these on the OCZ Agility 3 series, getting a high quality SSD just got a heck of a lot more affordable.

A number of “select” Agility 3 solid state drives from OCZ have gone on sale on Amazon with discounts ranging from 46% off to 67% off. Considering that the regular price on some of these solid state drives is as high as $649.99, that’s some serious savings. The Agility 3 SATA III series solid state drives are meant to provide “an exceptional balance of performance and value,” slotting in as mid-tier SSDs.

The 120GB model with max 525MB/s read times, for example, can now be had for just $84.99, which is an incredible $171 off the regular price of $255.99. There’s an additional $10 off rebate too, bringing the price down to just $74.99. Check out OCZ SSD sale on Amazon for more killer deals. The 90GB, 240GB and 480GB drives are selling for $79.99, $179.99 and $349.99, respectively. That represents savings of up to $300! Smoking good deal.

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Some of you may be on the fence about going down the SSD route. Well, we’ve decided to do a bootup comparison of two nearly identical MacBook Pro models. Both are 2.5Ghz MacBook Pro 15″ with 2GB RAM running a fresh copy of Lion. The difference however, is the one on the left has a 7200RPM 500GB Seagate hard drive with those spinning disc platter things that take forever. And on the right, a freshly loaded 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD harddrive. You tell me what you want to live with after watching the video.

The benchmarks on the SSD are phenomenal. Uncached Write speeds were hitting 74.44 MB/sec, Uncached Reads were hitting 17.51 MB/sec. Performance on this was better with larger blocks. You can compare to our xBench score here.

The SSD drive boots in 14 seconds and beats the Seagate even when being powered up after. Everything seems faster too, launching windows, multitasking, tabbed browsing. This is probably the most affordable way to upgrade your computer while actually feeling a big difference. Not to mention, if you’re prone to dropping your notebook, SSDs don’t suffer the same head crashing that traditional platter hard disc drives do. If you want to know how to do it yourself there’s plenty of resources all over the web about hard drive swapping on the MacBook Pro.

The OCZ Vertex 2 SSD is actually on sale now for $150 from NCIX.

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The Octane SSD uses the standard 2.5-inch size that you find in most notebook computers. In addition to the higher capacity, this SSD also uses the new Indlinx Everest controller, which provides an “instant on” feature for up to 50% faster booting.

OCZ says that the Octane SSD will sell for somewhere between $1.10 and $1.30 per gigabyte, so a 128GB model would sell for $166. That would put the terabyte drive barely into the four figure range, so that certainly would be appropriate for the budget-minded PC builder. It’ll also be sold in 256GB and 512GB flavors.

The SSD will be available with SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) or with SATA 2.0 (3Gbps), surely with prices to match. If you go with the faster one, you can expect maximum sequential read and writes at 560MB/s and 400MB/s with 45,000 read IOPS using 4K blocks.

[OCZ]

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