SSDs still have a way to go before they are on par with traditional hard drives as far as price and storage capacity goes. Ridata, however, today announced three new SSDs that are at least helping to push the price barrier down to more affordable levels.

The new Ridata SSDs use multi-level cell (MLC) technology that allows the storage of two data bits per cell making for fast read and write speeds with low power consumption. Low power consumption is the key to longer battery life in a notebook and utility savings in the enterprise environment.

The line of SSDs is called the Ridata Ultra-S Plus series and will be available in 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities. The drives have a mean time between failure of 4,000,000 hours and data integrity is enhanced with static wear leveling and Reed-Solomon ECC. Ridata says that SMART features work to provide a write endurance cycle of up to 1,000,000 times depending on the drive capacity.

According to Ridata, the drives have a read speed of 128MB/sec and a write speed of 80MB/sec.

The Ridata SSDs connect to notebooks and PCs via a traditional SATA connection. The line of drives will be available in late July and according to Engadget; the 32GB SSD will sell for $169.90, the 64GB for $294.90, and the 128GB will sell for $537.90.

The pricing for the 32GB is right in line with OCZ's new Core Series SSDs, however, the 64GB and 128GB models are a bit more expensive. Samsung announced a line of SSDs that also use MLC technology in July.

[Source]