Chicago (IL) – Transcend is one of the less visible companies in the SSD space, but in fact has one of the most complete product lines currently available. The company today announced a new 192 GB SSD version in a 2.5” form factor, which isn’t exactly cheap, but may be exactly what those who are not willing to spend $800 on Intel’s high-speed drives.

Intel’s SSDs may be pitched as mainstream SSDs, but they are still far from being mainstream mass storage for most of us. $400 for 80 GB and $800 for 160 GB is a lot of money, even if you can read data at a pace of 250 MB per second. If you can live with less performance, you can look to other manufacturers, who often offer more capacity for less money – Transcend is one of them.

The company is now offering a 192 GB MLC-based SSD that reads data at 150 MB/s and writes at up to 90 MB/s, which is well above the performance that is offered by the fastest hard drive. The price is still high at $614 MSRP, but we already saw some retailers listing the drive for as low as $480. Transcend described the drive as a high-speed SSD and if you can live with slightly less performance and less capacity, you can buy a 32 GB drive for about $80, 64 GB for about $120 and 128 GB for about $245.

The 2.5” drive comes in a 2.5” form factor and includes features such as integrated ECC (Error Correction Code) to ensure accurate data transfer, as well as a built-in wear leveling technology that promises “ultra-long storage lifespan”. The reliability of the drive is indicated with 1 million hours MTBF.