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The PlayStation 3 Super Slim may not have hugely impressed us when we took a look at it in its 500GB incarnation a couple of months back, but we were excited by its future potential - specifically, the ability to offer a full PS3 experience at a very low retail price. At upwards of £200 at launch, the new model was simply too expensive when the older Slim offered better build quality at much the same price, but in the post-Christmas sales the 12GB entry-level machine was available to buy for less than £120. Now that's superb value you simply can't argue with.Historically, it's the presence of the mandatory hard drive that has been a major factor in the PS3's relatively high price up against its drive-less Xbox 360 competitor. Typically, HDDs don't tend to fall in price dramatically - capacity simply increases. On top of that, Sony's plans for cost-reductions were thwarted by a flooding disaster in Thailand which crippled drive production and doubled prices worldwide within weeks - to this day, hard drives are still significantly more expensive than they were prior to the crisis. The 12GB model addresses all of these issues: it replaces pricey mechanical drives with flash memory that, conversely, has seen prices plummet in the last couple of years.
Initially, it was believed that Sony had simply gained access to an inventory of small capacity SSDs and would ship them in the PS3's traditional hard drive bay, where it could be replaced with any other 2.5-inch hard drive, so perhaps the biggest surprise upon receiving our 12GB unit was the complete absence of anything in the expansion slot. On the one hand, this was good news - upgrading to a hard drive would be fast and painless. On the other, no SSD-type arrangement means Sony had integrated a simple flash module onto the motherboard - and, as anyone with experience of USB flash drives will know, read and write speeds vary massively from one chip to the next.
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