Samsung has really been on the ball with the advancement of Flash Solid-State Disk (Flash SSD) drives. SanDisk recently decided to throw its hat into the ring, too. Not to be left out, Ritek has decided to join the party as well.

The company announced that it will deliver RiDATA branded SSDs with capacities of 16GB and 32GB in Q2 2007. The drives will be available in 1.8" and 2.5" form-factors with ATA and IDE interfaces.

Ritek also stated that it will be looking to OEMs and channel customers for distribution of its SSDs. SanDisk, on the other hand, is looking to limit distribution of its drives to notebook OEMs.

Ritek has confirmed Samsung will likely be the primary manufacturer for its solid-state drive. If Samsung does indeed provide the memory chips, it would likely be the new 50 nanometer multi-level cell (MLC) chips with vastly improved read/write performance.

As for pricing, Riteks’s new drives will be ultra competitive with existing solutions. The 16GB version will have an MSRP of $265 USD for the 1.8” version and $270 USD for the 2.5” version. Pricing for the 32GB version was not released, but it likely will easily undercut the $600 premium commanded by the 32GB SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000.

A 64GB version of the drive is also due to be released later this year. We will bring you more information as soon as it is available.