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LiteOn to start selling consumer SSDs

by Ryan Martin on 16 December 2014, 15:00

Tags: Lite-On (TPE:2301)

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Another vendor is taking a leap into the consumer solid-state drive (SSD) market and this time it’s the OEM brand Lite-On. Though more well-known for its optical-drive business, Lite-On is actually the company behind SSD brand Plextor, and this fact alone makes Lite-On’s venture into the consumer SSD business somewhat strange.

Lite-On’s new range of consumer-grade SSDs will be marketed under the ZETA product series which starts with an initial roll-out for the Asian market. EU and North American availability is expected a later date but has not yet been confirmed by the company.

The ZETA series will be offered with a trio of capacities: 128GB (LCH-128V2S), 256GB (LCH-256V2S) and 512GB (LCH-512V2S) all featuring Silicon Motion’s SM2246EN controller. Lite-On is deploying SK hynix’s 16nm MLC NAND flash paired up with LPDDR3 DRAM controller cache that is equivalent to the drive’s capacity, the 128GB drive gets 128MB of cache and so on.

All drives feature 520MB/s read speeds while the write speed declines with reduced capacity due to the decreasing number of NAND flash dies and channels present. Resultantly, the 512GB has a headlining 430MB/s write speeds with the 256GB and 128GB models having much slower 290MB/s and 150MB/s write speeds, respectively.

IOPS are also capacity-dependant with 67,500, 82,500 and 83,500 random 4K reads and 37,500, 72,500 and 80,000 random 4K writes for the 128, 256 and 512GB models, respectively. Standard features such as TRIM, NCQ and 256-bit AES encryption are also built into the ZETA SSDs.

In the Chinese market, where they will initially sell the Lite-On models, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB ZETA SSDs will retail for 439, 799 and 1,599 yuan respectively. That equates to $71, $129 and $258, therefore roughly hitting the 50 cents-per-gigabyte mark.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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They make relatively decent optical drives and other oem replacement parts. Considering that history, that initial price point isn't anything all that special, and might be considered (for the company) to be a bit high.

Still worth keeping an eye on.
This is a strange one. They never made hard drives or RAM in the past. Hmmm… wonder if Pioneer will make SSD's next
The SSD market is very competitive at the moment and it seems like an odd move for a company that, as above, hasn't made anything similar before to start now. The only way they'd be able to distinguish themselves from the top dogs such as crucial, Samsung Kingston among others is to keep prices really low. That in itself would be a tough job, because I doubt their margins for profit wouldn't be very big anyway, as they'll have to buy most of the components in as it is.
Makes sense to me. Liteon love to sell components such as DVD drives to big manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo etc. An SSD can be viewed in the same way. They are a lot simpler to design and assemble than a HDD (HDD is very mechanical and custom - Custom Platters, controllers, heads etc vs an off the shelf controller and flash). They will probably be looking to discount high for big bulk purchasing OEMs so having a high initial price makes sense. (Also helps that Dell etc won't state the manufacturer of the SSD in the specs…)
Interesting indeed. I've had a few LiteOn DVD drives over the years but have settled back to Pioneer now. I love my Samsung SSD's.. Worth a go maybe these are depending on the price and warranty offered.