ChatGPT's New Skills Resident Evil 4 Remake Galaxy A54 5G Hands-On TikTok CEO Testifies Huawei's New Folding Phone How to Use Google's AI Chatbot Airlines and Family Seating Weigh Yourself Accurately
Want CNET to notify you of price drops and the latest stories?
No, thank you
Accept
Science

Intel 60GB solid-state drive sinks to $89

Chip giant announces its most competitively priced consumer SSD to date.

Brooke Crothers headshot
Brooke Crothers
Intel SSD 330 is the cheapest dollar-per-gigabyte solid-state drive from Intel to date
Intel SSD 330 is the cheapest dollar-per-gigabyte solid-state drive from Intel to date.
Intel

Intel today announced the availability of a series of solid-state drives with a 60GB version selling for $89, the least expensive dollars-per-gigabyte drive to date from Intel.

The 330 Series use a SATA 6 gigabit-per-second (Gb/s), giving "consumers a more affordable entry into the accelerated storage performance of SSDs," Intel said in a statement. The SATA 6Gb/s interface doubles the bandwidth of its current SATA 3Gb/s Intel SSD 320 Series.

The 330 series IOPS are higher in this chart because of a different metric used by Anandtech, referred to as 'queue depth'
The 330 series IOPS are higher in this chart because of a different metric used by Anandtech, referred to as 'queue depth' Anandtech

SSDs are typically faster than mainstream spinning hard disk drives and, in some cases, a lot faster. Intel is claiming up to 500 megabytes-per-second (MB/s) sequential read speeds and up to 450MB/s sequential write speeds. Random read performance can go up to 22,500 Input-Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and 33,000 write IOPS.

Drives are also offered in 120GB ($149) and 180GB ($234) capacities.

The $89 60GB SSD 330 compares favorably on price with SSD 520 Series announced in February. The latter is priced at $149 for 60GB in 1,000-unit quantities.