Customer Reviews

Ridata 32 GB External Solid State Drive (SSD) RDESSD32G-R-BX

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

We purchased 8 of these and so far 2 weeks later, 2 of the drives have flaked out and are no longer working (partition size shows as 1.92GB and the drives will not format). When they worked, they were incredibly fast, but the data on them is unreliable at best. You will copy data to it, plug it into another machine to copy the data from it and it will say "Drive is not initialized" and presto, you've lost all your data.. Don't waste your time!!

ZERO STARS!!!

After a week of extensive use on Vista, Windows 7, and Leopard.

(+) Works well out of the box.

(+) Benefits of a SSD such as no moving part, noiseless, low power consumption. Can be used as a fast external boot volume if your BIOS supports it.

(+) Build: Very nicely designed and feel solid in your hand. I also own the Kingston DataTraveler 64 GB stick. the RiDATA kicks DataTraveler's behind in terms of speed and build quality. The massive capacity is both comforting and unnerving; I would not risk losing that much of my personal data, should it get misplaced or corrupted. The Kingston's build is a little plasticky & flimsy. RiDATA has nicer form factor than the Cavalry Pelican Series but a little slower in term of theoretical transfer speed.

(+) Versatility: both USB & eSATA, which offers faster transfer speed compared to USB 2.0.

(+) Speed: Rated the fastest portable SSD stick on the market by tomsguide(dot)com in Feb 2009. SSD is faster than flash. A 700MB avi movie is transferred in 30 seconds using the USB port. I haven't tried the eSATA port yet.

(-/+) No built-in security measures (software, biometrics, etc).
(-/+) Need a special USB cable for non-powered eSATA port.
(-/+) Reliability: Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is >250k hours, compared to > 1,000k hours for internal drives. But realistically, one probably never reach that number.

*** Wishful thinking - incorporation of bluetooth module for wireless data transfer and bluetooth computer proximity lockdown software option.

*** Note - SSD prices are a rather rapid descent, not unlike the platter hard drives of years past. So if you **need** a nice external SSD now, i would recommend this one. However, there is no true urgency to acquire one now if you can wait.

I had run out of space on my 6 GB Sandisk so I purchased one of these in late November 2009, within two weeks I had the same problem mentioned in another review. THe drive woudl only show 1.92 GB. Discovered warnings from other customers buried (took 4 hours of searching) that warned not to plug these into eSATA unpowered ports even when using the included usb extension cable. When submitting my return I suggested that the warning be included to help customers avoid Data loss....

Submitted it and was returned the same drive that failed again within a week, but this time it was not even be recognized from within Windows Vista x64 or 32, Windows 7, or Mac OS X 10.6, and this time I only plugged it in by the usb, which defeats half the point of purchase, the size is nice but useless when you lose 4 hours of work.

Oh did I mention I work for a Streaming Media Comapny as a support tech/developer, so I am more educated than most on hardware and software issues. I am paid to watch over 500-100 servers onmy shifs and get to set-up all the desktops for new employees.

While waiting on the next return I brokedown and contacted Kanguru who sells a power conditioner port seperate, well actually that isn't advertised but if you contact them they will sell you one and one of the esata powered sheilded cables that come standard with their drives that look exactly the same as these. (Probably because they know the issue that RiDATA is too cheap to deal with before hand) Kanguru sold me the adapter and the cable for 28$ 37$ after shipping, add in the 2 shipments back to RiDATA at 15-18 apiece (has to be registered mail) and I could have had the 64 GB drive from Kanguru if you include the orginial cost of this drive.

Now I have the new drive that I recieved not more than 3 days ago and it has failed as well, but only after I was able to transfer all of the data I planned on carrying on this drive. After the intial transfer I plugged it into a different Windows OS and it asked me to reformat again, but failed shortly there after.

UNTIL they include the proper power conditioner or fix their firmware avoid this product.

PS Lost 4 hours of development work that was due the following morning when the second drive failed.... So could have purchased the 64GB kanguru easily considering what my time is worth, or at least what I am paid factor into this nightmare.

I've been using the 32GB model for well over a month now. I use it to store a Virtual Box image of a Windows 2008 server and do all my programming on that system. I've had no problems at all switching between my laptop using eSATA and desktop using USB 2.0. My virtual machine boots and operates much much faster with the image on this device than it does on an internal 7,200 RPM hard disk.

Best IT purchase I've made in a while!

The drive I got is either completely defective, in which case the one star rating still applies, or the description is simply misleading:

You cannot plug in the USB side of the drive and use it as a storage device. The USB connector is for power ONLY. If you plug in the USB side only, you will get an "Unrecognized USB device" error or "Unknown Device" error. Sometimes the drive is actually read correctly from USB, but in these cases WinXP will continually ask you to format the drive, which it will not allow (just gives a generic "Windows could not format this drive" error).

The ONLY way to get this drive to work is to plug in the eSATA and THEN plug in the USB for power (some machines have combination USB/eSATA ports in which case you can plug in simply the eSATA). So be warned - do not make the mistake of thinking you can plug the eSATA into one computer and then have backwards USB compatibility with older machines. The drive does not work that way, despite the way it implies to be "USB 2.0 compatible" in the description.

Also the eSATA seems quite flaky as well - sometimes it seems to be recognized, and other times it does not (tried with 4 different computers, all of which work fine with normal USB thumb drives).