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

(Credit: 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'

(Credit: 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.