Intel X25-M’s Street Price Revealed

Yesterday, Intel officially released its groundbreaking X25-M SSD with a wholesale price of $595 in quantities of up to 1,000. After reviewing the X25-M and finding it to be the fastest notebook drive of all time, we were disappointed that Intel would note be selling it in a retail box, but dying to know: what would the street price be when vendors started to sell it as a whitebox, OEM product? We didn’t have to wait long for our answer. A search this morning reveals a few different e-tailers have already started taking pre-orders:

• Wiredzone.com lists the X25-M for $656.67
• MacMall lists the X25-M for $674.99
• PCMall, which is the same company as MacMall, has it for $738.99, which is truly bizarre. We recommend pretending you have a Mac and using MacMall instead.

Considering that Intel Product Line Manager Kishore Rao told us that the $595 price per thousand is the highest wholesale price a vendor can pay and that larger customers who order in bulk pay a lot less, we are still hoping that an e-tailer will be able to buy in significant quantities so that they can offer the drive to consumers for less than the $595 and still make a profit. We can dream. Can’t we?