Fast and Affordable, Just Not Leading In Either

Then does OCZ's Arc 100 deliver the dream of even cheaper SSDs? In a word, no... simply it does provide more competition for Crucial's MX100. At $0.50 per gigabyte for the 240GB and 480GB models, the Arc 100 serial isn't setting any new records and the reality is, unless you are prepared to evangelize seriously loftier SATA SSD performance at previously unheard of prices so you might as well give up on delivering a value SSD.

On average, the Arc 100 240GB was 16% slower than the MX100 512GB in our file copy tests and while OCZ's offering is cheaper and faster than Samsung's Evo series, the latter is likewise more than a year old. Of notation, we would have preferred to exam the 480GB Arc 100 for fairer results but OCZ didn't accept samples. Still, on paper the larger 480GB model can only hope to exist about five% faster, which isn't enough to catch the MX100.

Every bit it stands, the just real competition the Arc 100 faces is from the MX100 and equally far as we can tell, OCZ has lost the performance battle and is likely going to lose out when information technology comes to pricing also. The MX100 256GB tin can already exist had for $0.45 per gigabyte while the 512GB model for simply $0.41 a gig -- almost xx% cheaper than the Arc 100 480GB'due south MSRP. Hopefully OCZ can afford to be more than aggressive with pricing.

Pros: The Arc 100 is relatively affordable, reasonably fast and ships with one of the simplest software utilities around.

Cons: Compared to Crucial's MX100, it's pricier, slower, has less endurance and lacks some encryption features.