Intel has decided to slightly reduce its NAND prices, but its SSD drives are still insanely expensive. In November, Intel was selling its X18-M 80GB, an 1.8-inch drive and X25-M 80GB, an 2.5-inch drive, for $600; and as of the first days of December both drives will be selling for $525 each.

The company is about to introduce the new drive called X25-E 32GB. This is a 2.5-inch drive and this one will start selling for $700.  On the last days of December it will drop down to $575 to meet the price drop of many Core 2-based notebook CPUs. The 64GB version of the same drive will launch in 2009 at a higher price. The M series should fit in mainstream notebooks, while E series should bring extreme performance.

X25-E should be able to support a sustained read at 240MB/s and insanely fast write of 170MB/s, while X25-M or X18-M can support 240MB/s read but much slower 70MB/s write, but with average 0.25W when active while X25-E needs ten times more, 2.4W on average. 

They are still insanely expensive and they will be a good alternative to HDDs, once they drop in price at least 10 times from where they are now.