Ritek's 16GB and 32GB SSDs starting at a low, low $270

Well hot damn kids, Ritek just announced that their take on the Solid State Disk (SSD) will begin shipment this year. Impressive enough seeing as how only Samsung (and perhaps TDK) can pull this off currently. But what if we told you that they'll cost your friendly OEM a mere $169 to slip 16GB of that cool RiDATA flash into your swank new laptop? That's right, just $169 for a 1.8-inch 16GB SSD or $199 for the 2.5-inch version. They'll also offer 32GB SSDs at launch (64GB near the end of the year) which we can only assume will be less than twice the cost of the 16GB version when purchased in bulk. That's damn cheap, and likely far less than the $600 premium already quoted for the 1.8-inch 32GB SSD from SanDisk. When? Q2, that's when. Can you wait?

Update: Bad news: DigiTimes now states that the Ritek 1.8-inch, 16GB and 32GB SSD cards will cost $270 (not $169 as originally reported) and $475, respectively. Still, not bad.

[nicleT @ Jan 9th 2007 6:20PM]

Wow! Can we put this in a 4Gb iPhone?? Hehehe!

[Jonathan Keim @ Jan 9th 2007 6:26PM]

Wow, flash memory is getting cheap very fast. I can't wait until we have 32 GB PSPs, phones, and laptops

[Diego AC @ Jan 9th 2007 6:30PM]

you can't update a iPhone, but an 30-80GB MP3 player....

[Thomas S @ Jan 9th 2007 6:30PM]

Sweet. Get one of those for my desktop and load windows onto it. should speed things up nicely

[Karl Viklund @ Jan 9th 2007 6:34PM]

32 GB is just too little. We have HDDs today with a capacity of 750-1000 GB which are not insanely expensive. I want to see what a 750 GB flash disk would cost... 32 GB is just pathetic when it comes to Laptops. But they are really great for MP3-players.

[Ben @ Jan 9th 2007 6:48PM]

The size of drive matters very little. In the context of laptop operation it results in a lowered battery life, immunity (more or less) to repetitive shocks that kill normal platter drives, and access time to data that is unbeaten by any normal hard drive. It's not meant for you to store your entire MP3 collection, it's primarily aimed at business users and the small percentage of gamers that demand such high performance to whom 32 GB is sufficient. Solid state isn't really meant to compete for much of the desktop market simply because the power draw and shock protection has next to no relevance. As it stands now, there are larger models already in the pipeline, and I wouldn't be too surprised if SSD could match the size of perpendicular 1.8" drives within a few years.

[missed_again @ Jan 9th 2007 9:21PM]

Do you have any idea how much faster you can access SSD than you can with a regular HDD?

On a bootup test the SSD beat out the HDD by 6 seconds, which although it may not seem much to you it is a huge lead in terms of read/write times.

I'm excited to see if this will lead to laptops having space dedicated to the Operating system on SSD while still relying on a regular HDD for the rest of the data.

[Ender78 @ Jan 10th 2007 11:29AM]

32GB is plenty for primary storage. There is no reason that a notebook cannot contain both. 32 GB SSD for the OS and 120GB for movies and other media. No notebook has a 750GB drive, I see no reason whatsover for that kind of storage in the field. Need more storage, carry a 3.5" drive in an external enclosure with you.

[Eddie @ Jan 9th 2007 6:55PM]

Whats the catch for such a low price?

[Anonymous @ Jan 9th 2007 7:11PM]

The catch? Probably much slower than the Sandisk.

[myscrnnm @ Jan 9th 2007 6:57PM]

"32 GB is just too little. We have HDDs today with a capacity of 750-1000 GB which are not insanely expensive."

Yeah, but not for notebook computers. And keep in mind that the cost-per-GB for solid state memory is immensely more expensive than that of hard disk drives. While $169 is admittedly extremely expensive for 16GB of storage space, it's a good price to pay to get one of the first SSDs on the market.

[MysticGolem @ Jan 9th 2007 7:05PM]

This is GREAT!!! I am extremely surprised a company is starting the PRICE WAR this early into the consumer end of SSD. This is extremely good news!

For laptops, this means increased battery life, faster boot times, programs load faster, less heat, no noise.

In my opinion 32GB is rather small, but heck you can still do a lot with 32GB.

I personaly would need roughly 150GB on my laptop, I currently own an ASUS V1JP which has a 120GB HDD, but if SSD makes a 100GB and is roughly $100 by Q1 Jan 2008, then all that's left it that someone tests this technology in comparison to what i have and BAM I will most likely purchase it.

PS: I will also be looking into getting an ASUS V2 series or VX2 series notebook by December 2007, since I want more portability and more battery life!

Go SSD!!!!! Can't wait till we get 300+ GB SSD for Desktops, I currently have a Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 and I am happy with it but, I want more, way more performance from my hard drive!.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

[shaun @ Jan 9th 2007 7:42PM]

hhhhmmmmm???
No mention whether it's 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm.
I hope it comes with 16mb cache.
That would be the bomb!

[Sinbios @ Jan 10th 2007 11:07AM]

I'm not quite sure if you're being serious or not.

[Greg @ Jan 9th 2007 7:46PM]

So why does a 2.5 inch version of the same capacity cost more? Am I missing something?

[kev @ Jan 9th 2007 7:46PM]

In an ultraportable where battery life is everything (and I cannot stress that point enough), this is more than welcome. Who cares if you have only 16GB of space...you shouldn't have everything on that machine anyway.

[peter @ Jan 9th 2007 7:51PM]

@shaun
A spinning flash drive, eh?
I thought this one does 0rpm?

[Jim Jonze @ Jan 9th 2007 7:52PM]

I for one welcome our solid state hard drive overlords.

32GB would be just about enough for the OS, apps and critical files for the majority of laptop users (most business users are generating Word and Excel files that aren't terribly large). If you DO need more room to store large media files and other info, you can always throw a 160GB Western Digital Passport drive in your laptop bag and have the best of both worlds.

[Tim Marman @ Jan 12th 2007 4:24PM]

@missed_again:

In laptops, SSD will be more likely to replace HDDs entirely because of the advantages it has in that context - no moving parts and MUCH less power draw.

But hybrid drives are also an advantage on the desktop. Generally speaking, this is reflected across the board in computer design. Look at L2 cache, RAM and then physical HD space. At each step, the memory gets slower and cheaper. What we're adding is something between the RAM and physical HD space.

In fact, Vista Premium certificate requires hybrid drives. http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/13/Laptop-Vista-Premium-certification-will-require-hybrid-HDDs/

[jack @ Jan 9th 2007 9:25PM]

any chance of getting 2 32GB SSD on RAID 0, and slip them into a 2.5" housing with RAID controller built in, so you get 64GB, and it runs much faster (they can make MicroSD and M2 cards so small, they sure can make SSD thin and small)

[Ende @ Jan 9th 2007 10:57PM]

"32 GB is just too little. We have HDDs today with a capacity of 750-1000 GB which are not insanely expensive."

It's great news. surely you realize the purpose of the SSDs are "not" storage?

[Karl Viklund @ Jan 10th 2007 12:24PM]

Ok. So what are you going to do with a HDD if not storing files on them? Look at them? Nice one.

[mcubed45 @ Jan 10th 2007 1:21AM]

blah double post

[mcubed45 @ Jan 10th 2007 1:22AM]

"hhhhmmmmm???
No mention whether it's 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm.
I hope it comes with 16mb cache.
That would be the bomb!"

i hope you're not serious. if so you have no clue what SSD technology is.

hint: it spins at 0 rpm and has a 32GB cache. (YES that's 32 *GIGA*bytes)"hhhhmmmmm???
No mention whether it's 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm.
I hope it comes with 16mb cache.
That would be the bomb!"

i hope you're not serious. if so you have no clue what SSD technology is.

hint: it spins at 0 rpm and has a 32GB cache. (YES that's 32 *GIGA*bytes)

[tekdroid @ Jan 10th 2007 1:24AM]

flash doesn't have unlimited write life, so it would be interesting to see reliability figures on these drives after 2 years of relatively heavy daily use.

[monolith @ Jan 10th 2007 2:20AM]

Has it been proven that this particular SSD technology is an improvement over conventional HDDs in terms of read/write speed? A while ago people were so excited to put CF cards in their media pc (using a CF to IDE adapter) only to find the speed was horrible compared to spinners. Now, I know CF isn't the same kind of memory, but I'm also pretty sure the chips in an SSD aren't the same stuff as the speedy cache of a normal HDD.

To offer some perspective/reality in all the news of available SSDs, have a look at my computer. It's got a loaded i-RAM card (4x1GB unbuffered buffalo) in it holding windows MCE2005. ((You probably know i-RAM, but if not: it's a 'PCI card' which acts as a SATA drive, using up to 4 sticks of DDR RAM. The PCI slot only supplies power, the drive is connected by sATA.)) The other specs are just a fast AMD CPU, good mobo ..blah blah blah.. My point is even if the SATA bus speed is maxed out, it still takes at least 8 seconds for windows to be up and running. Booting, due to the design of computers (as well as their OS), is slow and is not entirely dependent on the speed of the memory. I know this by experience, not rumor and speculation.

I'll buy a 64GB one whenever they come out and put it into an mp3 player (iPod with this!) if a manufacturer doesn't beat me to it. When they have a 128GB, then I'll consider one for a laptop.

[nikster @ Jan 10th 2007 11:36AM]

16GB small? I think this will be used as virtual memory in windows and make everything damn fast. Suddenly I would have 18G of RAM - not really, the flash is way slower than RAM - but also way faster than a HD.

I want it. Almost as badly as an iPhone ;)

[Karl Viklund @ Jan 10th 2007 12:26PM]

Yea, agree. That's a good usage for it. But for file-storage or for "normal" computer ues, yes, it is a very very very very small drive. We had conventional drives with that capacity many many years ago.

[andrewjohn81 @ Jan 10th 2007 12:02PM]

This will actually help us power users a lot too. I'll be wanting probably a 64Gig one, don't need much bigger than that, for all my temp files. Things like photoshop, 3d redering, and that sort create huge files. They also offer automatic backup features, but with saving files that are 250MB you can't do it every 5 minutes. SSD makes that possibility a bit closer.

I'll be using them for temp files and anything I want to access a bit quicker. Maybe temporary storage for burning to blueray and HDDVD when I get it? That would ensure fast enough data rate to the disk.

I Really hope these things hit the market for More that just laptop users, although, I would like one in mine too to save battery life.

[fraggle_rocker @ Jan 10th 2007 12:35PM]

he just meant its more for running stuff, not for putting your mp3's onto. For example put windows on it and run windows off it, files that you normally just store (mp3, mpg, avi) can go somewhere else, like a hard drive.

[n3ldan @ Jan 10th 2007 10:31PM]

three things:
1) STOP SAYING SSD's ARE FASTER. THEY ARE NOT. They have faster random reads than traditional hard drives, but are slower at sequential reading than fast hard drives (SCSI drives can reach over 150MB/s, sandisk's tops out at about 68MB/s). SSD's are EVEN SLOWER at writing (18MB/s compared to upwards of 50MB/s for fast traditional drives)

2) No moving parts is FAR more important than the read/write times. This means NO NOISE(if you dismiss this as nothing, you've never turned on a 100% silent computer, the silence is wonderful) , (virtually) NO WEAR AND TEAR, and (most importantly, and as stated previously) means you can drop that new laptop with the hard drive spinning and have virtually no chance of any problems. "Rugged" notebook drives can sustain 200-300Gs of shock (while that sounds impressive, it's not *that* much when you've dropped your 10lb alienware POS...) and 900Gs non-operating. These SSDs can easily sustain that much while operating, and don't care about vibration or other abuse that would normally kill a drive. This makes it ideal for weird-ass military operations and the like.

Hard drives are probably the single point in a computer most prone to failure (well, maybe after removable media), with SSDs this is no longer true.

The only thing I'm worried about is how quickly flash memory can wear out...

[Steve @ Sep 8th 2007 2:55PM]

Most SSDs will operate for ~2,000,000 hrs, or 50 years. They will last longer than a platter HD.
www.healthywellness.net

[Denus @ Jan 11th 2007 9:32AM]

I'd like to use one of these in a desktop for the OS and apps. Wonder if there are any adapters to make it fit in a normal bay.

[Stephen @ Jan 11th 2007 8:28PM]

This is awesome. Sure, it's not the same size as conventional hard drives, but once these get to 100GB or thereabouts, I would strongly consider going for one of these over my current 2.5 inch laptop drive. I have had too many hard drive failures and data corruption that I suspect is caused by a bad hard drive to deal with any more of those once there is another option. The increases in speed and power efficiency are nice bonuses, for me the real deal is reliability/durability.

[Neal @ Feb 25th 2007 2:03PM]

They operate at ATA-3

[Steve @ Sep 8th 2007 2:56PM]

For a laptop, use a pcmcia 8-16GB SSD to load your OS/programs faster and a conventional platter HD to store files.
www.tryptamind.com