Intel said the drive has a 1.2 million-hour mean time before failure (MTBF) rate, but most industry experts do not consider MTBF to be a reliable method of measuring drive longevity, preferring write/erase cycles instead. Most multilevel cell NAND flash memory products have a maximum of 10,000 write/erase cycles.

The X25-V has native command queuing as well as to increase performance.

When it comes to price per gigabyte, hard disk drives are still far cheaper than SSDs. According to Yang, SSDs cost from $2.50 to $3 per gigabyte, while hard disk drives cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. "For less than $100, you get a hard disk drive with a terabyte of capacity," Yang said.

According to Gregory Wong, a flash memory analyst at Forward Insights, pricing for nonvolatile memory, such as the NAND flash used in SSDs, has remained flat or increased slightly over the past year, and adoption has likewise been relatively flat. The brightest growth for SSD is in portable devices, such as MP3 players and smartphones.

"I think what Intel and OCZ are shooting at is a price point for the consumer," Wong said. "And it's whatever capacity you can get for $100. In my discussions with Intel, they're seeing good uptake of their 40GB SSD, but it's not going to replace a hard drive in a notebook."