RiData has built a new Solid State Drive, which is currently shipping out to OEM manufacturers and the device seems to be something out of the ordinary. Not just because of the quite acceptable storage capacity of 128GB, but mainly because of the read and write speeds. The read speed is suppose to be 235MB/s and the write speed 120MB/s. These are some very impressive figures for any harddrive, breathtaking for SSDs. Over at Bit-tech they’ve gotten acquainted with RiData’s SSD and share a small benchmark in the form of loading a map in the game Crysis. Something which usually takes 30-60 seconds on a 7200RPM harddrive takes a mere 16.8 seconds with the RiData 128GB SSD.
“We have some theories on how this is possible, as the drive also has some high-level ECC algorithms. It looks (as hypothesised by one of my engineer friends, Jamie from Matrix Orbital) as though it’s the controller that RiData has worked so hard on, perhaps opening up the data fetching bus while it was tooling with the error correction and random reading.”
As you probably have already figured out, there’s a catch and it’s the price. The 128GB model costs $3,000 and is simply just too expensive for regular consumers. However, RiData is also shipping 32GB and 64GB models to OEMs, which should cost a lot less, although still far beyond most people budgets.
Things are certainly improving and while performance is improving fast, prices and availability is still lingering. Hopefully we will see more retail-oriented drives soon.
