Product: RiData Ultra-S Plus 128GB SSD
Manufacturer: RiData / RITEK / Advanced Media, Inc.
Price: ~$300     Find Lowest Price @ PriceGrabber
Author: aliencam (Cameron Kopas)

RiData released a line of SSD drives called the Ultra-S Plus. This series of drives was announced at CES this year, (how did I miss that booth?) and they claim it is much faster than many of the other MLC drives available today.

Packaging & Physical

The RiData Ultra-S Plus comes in a simple plastic package that can be opened without cutting. The package snaps open and closed, revealing that there are two paper front and back inserts and then the product in the center. The drive is packaged in an anti-static bag, and includes four screws for attaching to a drive tray or wherever you are putting it. The anti-static bag is probably there because those plastic packages can really hold a charge when they come from the package manufacturer.

I was very surprised with the drive itself, as it was extremely light and surprisingly, made of plastic. I have never really thought about it before, but hard drives are all made of metal, and even the other SSDs I have handled have had a metal casing of some sort. The plastic at first seems a little weak for a hard drive, but it is still significantly more sturdy than the plastic used on most cell phones, and I can’t think of a normal situation that would involve the drive getting banged around very hard anyway. At the very least, the drive survived a week in my school bag, getting thrown around and probably smashed by books, my Leatherman wave, pens, screwdrivers, etc. (all of it without the anti-static bag), so I don’t foresee any problems with a plastic casing.

Manufacturer’s Specs

Benchmarks

The above benchmarks were done using SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3.  Unfortunately, the benchmarks were lower than the manufacturer’s specs, but the maximum results were consistent.

In a real-life test, I was able to get at least 106MB/s burst read while doing some Linux boot tweaking. With this SSD, a completely fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 on the EXT4 filesystem boots in 11.01 seconds, and an optimized install can boot in 7.00 seconds. This is amazing considering that the fastest I can get my hard drive down to is 16 seconds. I can’t wait until I can buy one of these and replace my laptop hard drive totally! Below are the original, and the tweaked bootcharts (sorry, they are cut off because the times are so fast).

Further Investigation

As I do with all my review, I decided to open the RiData Ultra-S Plus and see what it’s insides look like. The first thing I noticed when I went to take it apart was the dreaded “WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL BROKEN” sticker.

Now, there aren’t any parts inside that you can fix or replace anyway, so users should have no reason for opening the case, but still it is never nice to see that some companies still think that opening up something like this can actually damage it. In my opinion it should be “WARRANTY VOID IF YOU DO ANYTHING STUPID AND BREAK THE INTERNAL COMPONENTS” and several cases support that view (ASUS, IBM legal proceedings, etc.). I haven’t actually asked RiData how they treat this, but for now I will give them the ethical benefit of the doubt (hopefully they would replace a drive if it failed anyway, as long as nothing was broken by the user). Furthermore, the sticker was nearly broken all the way through when I got it (torn at least halfway). I wonder if this is common, or just because this is a review model, but it would have broken if I breathed on it too hard.

I then noticed that I could not find any screws in the normal places! I looked on the sides, on the bottom, and I felt for screws under the top sticker (sneaky trick that old HDD manufacturers used to play on us), and at first I almost poked a hole in the middle thinking I had found one! But I finally noticed that the single screw on the back of the drive is the only one keeping it shut. Even after removing the screw, the top cover does not lift up, but it slides back off of the case like a fuse box.

Once inside, there really isn’t much to see (sorry, I forgot to get pictures of the inside). The chip has 8 flash memory chips on each side, this time every slot is full (should be expected in the largest available capacity models), and the SATA II interface. If you purchased another SSD from RiData you would be able to swap the housings (maybe if you damage a newer housing you could put it into one in better condition).

Conclusion

The RiData SSD really is a fast, effective, and good quality Solid State Drive. It is nice to see the little things changing and being improved in this SSD, like a lighter, cheaper, (harder, better, faster, stronger) plastic casing. Impressive speeds and benchmarks also are welcome. I am glad to see that SSDs are finally transforming from a mainstream possibility, to a mainstream reality.

Tags: 2.5, Benchmark, hdd, Laptop, Netbook, Review, RiData, Solid State, SSD