SSD prices have plummeted over the past year. No wonder solid-state drives have been regular fixtures in our weekly deals posts. There are plenty of discounted drives out there right now, but none are quite as attractive as OCZ’s Vertex 3 120GB. This SandForce-based offering normally sells for $150, but it’s on sale for $90 right now. Throw in the $10 mail-in rebate, and you can get the drive for a mere $80 net. Even without the rebate, that works out to 75 cents per gigabyte.
120GB isn’t a lot of storage, so you’ll want to back that SSD with a mechanical hard drive. Good news. Newegg has Western Digital’s enterprise-grade RE4 1TB for $110 with promo code EMCNCND29. This 7,200-RPM drive may be limited to a 3Gbps Serial ATA interface, but that’s fast enough for its mechanical platters. As an added bonus, the RE4 comes with five years of warranty coverage.
Want $15 off Ivy Bridge? Newegg promo code EMCNCND28 knocks that amount off the cost of the Core i5-3570, dropping its price to $200. A similar discount can be applied to AMD’s A8-3870K, which ends up costing only $105 after applying promo code EMCNCND27. The A8 has a fully unlocked multiplier, while the Core i5 does not.
And now for something completely different. We’re partial to ultraportables here at TR, and Newegg has a pretty cheap one in Dell’s Inspiron iM101z. This 11.6-incher can be nabbed for only $290, which is less than the cost of most netbooks. A netbook this ain’t. The Inspiron has a 1366×768 display resolution, a Core i3-330UM processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive. The CPU is from the Arrandale generation, but I’d take it over anything from the current Atom family.
Up in Canada, NCIX is running a Sizzling Summer sale event with all kinds of discounts. There are numerous inexpensive SSDs, of course, but the best storage deal is probably Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB, which rings in at only $150. NCIX also has the top-of-the-line Ivy Bridge CPU on sale. The Core i7-3770K costs just $300 right now, $50 less than Newegg’s asking price for the processor. NCIX charges for shipping, though; all of the Newegg deals above have free shipping included.