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Our SSD of the Week series became a little side tracked over the past few weeks. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals going on, almost any SSD was a good buy. Now however, prices are back where they should be and the holidays are just around the corner. If you weren’t lucky enough to score a good deal yet, don’t worry because we are here to help.
Our last SSD of the Week was one of the first PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 SSDs on market, the Plextor M6e. It offers speeds that break the SATA 6Gb/s barrier and it even won the best of show award at FMS this year. Now, this week we are going to tone things down and highlight a low priced value oriented drive that is big on performance. This week’s SSD of the Week is the OCZ Arc 100.
The OCZ Arc 100 comes in a 2.5-inch 7mm form factor and capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. It features SMART, TRIM, 256-bit AES-compliant data encryption, and data path protection. It is rated for 100 is rated for 20GB/day of host writes for 3 years under typical client workloads. The ARC 100 offers a no-hassle 3 year ShieldPlus warranty.
Performance for the ARC 100 is rated for up to 490MB/s read 450MB/s write. IOPS wise, the Arc 100 is rated for 75,000/80,000 read/write. While these numbers aren’t the highest, based on our PCMark 8 consistency testing, the ARC 100 is still able to keep up with the big dogs, especially under heavy workloads. Check out our review here.
At the heart of the SSD is an INDILINX Barefoot 3 M10 SATA 6Gbps controller. This is the same controller that has been in Vertex 450 and 460. The DRAM is Micron 800MHz DDR3L. And for the NAND, it utilizes 19nm Toshiba Toggle Mode flash. All models utilize 7% of the NAND over provisioning for better performance.
Looking at amazon, prices show to be very competitive. The 120GB is $59.99, the 240GB is $94.99, and the 480GB is $189.99. If you missed out on a good SSD deal recently and are still on the lookout, look no further. Offering high performance, hardware encryption, and a 3-year ShieldPlus warranty, this is a deal that is hard to pass up at these prices.