Back at the start of July OCZ unveiled its Core series of SSDs that addressed one of the largest complaints about SSD drives—the price. While the Core Series SSDs are still more expensive than traditional HDDs of much higher capacity, the Core SSDs are downright cheap compared to other SSDs.

The first benchmarks for the Core Series 64GB SSD from OCZ have surfaced over at Laptop Magazine. Laptop put the SSD through some synthetic tests and the Core series did well in most tests against much more expensive SSDs and traditional HDDs.

Many fans of technology know that most analysts are predicting that SSDs will replace the traditional HDD in computer systems in the coming years. For now at least that transition simply isn’t happening because of the low capacities of SSDs, the high cost of SSDs, and the shorter typical lifespan of a SSD.

Samsung announced that it now has its multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs in production in 128GB and 64GB capacities. The main benefit of using MLC NAND flash as opposed to single-level cell is the lifespan. Samsung says that its MLC SSDs will have a life span 20 times longer than that of typical hard drives in today’s computers.

As the late George Carlin once pointed out, some words just don’t go together, like military intelligence. Other words that just don’t go together are affordable Solid State Drives. SSDs simply aren’t affordable, which is one of the major reasons we don’t see a massive adoption of SSDs in consumer notebooks and desktops.

Somehow OCZ has devised a way to make the SSD affordable. OCZ has announced a new line of Core Series SATA II 2.5-inch SSDs that will retail for about half the price of similar SSDs on the market. OCZ will be selling a 128GB SSD that will be priced at $479. Two other capacities will also be offered with a 64GB SSD going for $259 and a 32GB SSD going for $169.