RiDATA Ultra-S Plus SSD Review

Comments

• Ivan Icrontic’s Loveable Bot

  Dec 2008

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• Winga Member

  Dec 2008

  Hopefully there will be a big take-up on this technology and the price will be driven down quickly.

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• MiracleManS Member

  Dec 2008

  While the random read/write of small amounts of information is still a problem, I'm not aware of too many consumers who do a whole lot of .5kb reads/writes.
  
  Great review CB

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• pragtastic ICaBeard Member, Supporter

  Dec 2008

  I could very well be wrong on this, but I was under the impression that you would see most small read/writes come from OS tasks.
  
  But as I said, I could easily be wrong on that.

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• Thrax Professional Shill, Fashion Police, Complex Hierarchy Interpreter, Community Leader, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Dance Commander, Official Rep, Expo Attendee

  Dec 2008

  The average write size from a consumer is only 50KB.

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• CB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ, Event Organizer, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Writer, Expo Attendee

  Dec 2008

  I'm looking forward to the day when SSDs are comparable in price to magnetic drives. When that day comes, there will never be a reason to use another magnetic drive.

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• Eric Chen Guest

  Dec 2008

  This isn't a very good SSD article. There aren't any comparisons to other SSD's, and you didn't score the response time.

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• Winga Member

  Dec 2008

  The article is not about comparing other SSD's it's about how it compares to traditional magnetic notebook drives commonly found in today's notebooks. Also how will scoring response times add to the value of the article?

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• GHoosdum tequilavangelist  Community Leader, Event Organizer, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Expo Attendee

  Dec 2008

  I'm not incredibly surprised at the sounds made by the drive; my iPod Nano makes similar squeaks when writing music to it.

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• CB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ, Event Organizer, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Writer, Expo Attendee

  Dec 2008

  Eric Chen said:

  This isn't a very good SSD article. There aren't any comparisons to other SSD's, and you didn't score the response time.

  Thanks for your input. I actually agree to an extent: I would very much have liked to compare this drive to other SSDs, but we have to start somewhere, and this is our first SSD. When we get more, I'll start comparing them to each other. ;)

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• Tom Guest

  Dec 2008

  Aside from comparing against other SSDs, it would also help if you did a real-world kind of test of the drive, using it as the system drive for your main system for at least a couple of days (not just running benchmarks). If your system locks up like crazy all the time, or your system stops booting after a day, or you notice some other bad stuff, you should report it in your article. (It's great that you noted the noise issue, although why didn't you put that under cons? Wouldn't it disturb you if you bought one of these?)

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• GnomeWizardd Member

  Dec 2008

  i want to buy a OCZ SSd whenever there is one at a good price! because OCZ is the shiz

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• shwaip Community Leader, Writer

  Dec 2008

  SSDs tend to have shorter battery life than HDs. Just a heads-up.

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• Snarkasm The Photographer Member, Supporter

  Dec 2008

  I hate you so much right now, shwaip, because you know (or should know) that's not true.
  
  The studies you're thinking of are failures by Tom's Hardware that said, indeed, that a laptop ran out of battery faster than a mechanical drive - but they failed because they did more than twice the work in the same time span. They ran a looped HDD read/write test - and the SSD did work so much faster, it kept the processor busy requesting more instructions until it drained. If they had done a logical test, such as watching a video or music on a loop, which streams data at the same rate on both, you'd have seen a battery life increase.

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• Thrax Professional Shill, Fashion Police, Complex Hierarchy Interpreter, Community Leader, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Dance Commander, Official Rep, Expo Attendee

  Dec 2008

  Not only that, the most recent SLC SSDs have an MTBF that vastly eclipses mechanical drives. You'd have to write more than 100GB of data per DAY for FIVE YEARS to approach the write failure threshold.

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• Leonardo Community Leader

  Dec 2008

  You'd have to write more than 100GB of data per DAY for FIVE YEARS to approach the write failure threshold.

  You just answered the question I was about to post. Thanks.
  
  What was the breakthrough? Just one year ago it was an unofficial consensus that the flash memory being used for SSDs would not hold up well.

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• Snarkasm The Photographer Member, Supporter

  Dec 2008

  NAND architecture and better wear-leveling algorithms, in part.

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• Thrax Professional Shill, Fashion Police, Complex Hierarchy Interpreter, Community Leader, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Dance Commander, Official Rep, Expo Attendee

  Jan 2009

  Wear-leveling, superior cells, and write amplification.

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