Advanced Media, Inc., is a manufacturer and marketer of the popular Ridata brand of recordable DVD media, electronic storage products, and digital media accessories. The company is pleased to announce the Ridata Single Layer Cell (SLC) 2.5" IDE Ultra-S to its award-winning Ridata Solid State Drive (SSD) product line up. IDE is an established interface that is pin-to-pin compatible and eliminates setting the BIOS on installation. The Ridata SLC 2.5" IDE Ultra-S 16 and 32GB are now available, the 64 GB arrives in Q3 2008.

OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today unveiled the OCZ Core Series SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drives (SSDs). OCZ has gained momentum in this pioneering technology, which uses NAND flash instead of rotating platters as the storage medium, and is a high-performance, highly reliable and energy-efficient alternative to conventional hard disc drives.

With announcements coming in from of rolling out Solid State Drives (SSD) and that it would become a prominent player in the SSD business, Seagate is still in requirement of trade relationships with a NAND Flash manufacturer, add to that it doesn't have production facilities of its own.

This has gotten analysts to speculate on where Seagate will source its chips from, a possibility being buying Intel's share of the Intel-Micron JV. Such a buy-out would set Seagate back by close to $1 bn. Another possibility would be to acquire SanDisk or Hynix (Hyundai) which focus on making entry-level solid state drives, but are a major players in the overall NAND flash market. If it will be SanDisk, Hynix or any other flash maker remains to be seen, but it wouldn't come as a surprise if Seagate announces the acquisition of a flash company soon.

Solid State Drives hardly need an introduction. Putting your operating system and other important files on an ultra-quick flash drive makes everything a lot faster. Unfortunately, at this point, it also makes things a lot more expensive. Current offerings from brands such as Apple and Alienware increase the overall laptop price by anywhere from between $900 and $1300 USD. Analysts predict that this situation is not likely to get any better in the near future. They cite that the main reason has to do with actual storage offered by the SSD. 64GB of storage on the main hard disk simply does not cut it for most users, especially those willing to spend several hundred dollars just for the speed upgrade. Until big SSDs are available for a low price, they simply will not catch on. Analysts think that SSDs will catch on about five years from now.