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A-DATA rolls out S596-series SSDs, calls them the industry's fastest

by Parm Mann on 3 November 2009, 11:24

Tags: Adata (3260.TWO)

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A-DATA, one of the world's largest Flash memory providers, has today announced what it claims to be the industry's fastest solid state drive; its S596 series.

The drive, pictured to the right, is available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, and A-DATA quotes sequential read and write speeds of up to 250MB/s and 180MB/s, respectively.

That's quick, but the Taiwanese manufacturer isn't delving into detail - there's no mention of which NAND Flash memory resides within, and no mention of specific controllers. We do know that there's a DDR2 SDRAM cache of unspecified size, but all we've really got to go on is A-DATA's promise that the drive will "perform assorted applications five times faster".

What's interesting is that A-DATA has also equipped the drive with a mini USB port, and it's touting it as the ideal external hard drive for PC enthusiasts.

Rounding off a generally uninformative launch, A-DATA doesn't specify any details on availability or pricing.

HEXUS Forums :: 18 Comments

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Posted by 0iD - Tue 03 Nov 2009 11:25
I don't care how fast it is, they're still too small (capacity), and too expensive. Plus, if I'm quite honest, I don't really care that my computer takes 60 seconds as opposed to 20 seconds to boot into windows.
Posted by TooNice - Tue 03 Nov 2009 12:05
To small for the price for me, and I don't care about boot time improvement that much either. Still, the more competitive the market get, the sooner we will see any real price drop.

Regarding their claims, I don't think that the sequential speed is beating any record (or if it does, not by much). Would be interesting to see how it performs for small random read/write.

I also find it weird that anyone would buy an SSD drive to use it with an USB port at several time the cost - no matter how much more shock proof it is.
Posted by sayer - Tue 03 Nov 2009 12:09
I care a lot about the speed of my hard disk, but the most important statistic for me is the random read/write speeds, not really the sequential speeds. I wish they would release information on this more readily.
Posted by nightkhaos - Tue 03 Nov 2009 12:13
sayer
I care a lot about the speed of my hard disk, but the most important statistic for me is the random read/write speeds, not really the sequential speeds. I wish they would release information on this more readily.

Me to. But I guess they don't want people to know that, with the exception of Intel X25s, SSDs don't ofter a significant improvement of Random Read/Write times when compared to tranditional HDDs.

I find this odd consideirng that HDDs need to seek the data, whereas Random Read/Write times are all in the controller when it comes to SSDs.
Posted by Perfectionist - Tue 03 Nov 2009 12:18
nightkhaos
Me to. But I guess they don't want people to know that, with the exception of Intel X25s, SSDs don't ofter a significant improvement of Random Read/Write times when compared to tranditional HDDs.

I find this odd consideirng that HDDs need to seek the data, whereas Random Read/Write times are all in the controller when it comes to SSDs.
Yeah, all the marketing is focused on sequential speeds with no mention of read/write I/Os per second (IOPS) of a 4k chunk like most benchmarks do, it's very misleading especially when it's shouting the MB/s in gaming magazines like PC Gamer. I fell for it myself recently til someone put me right and I did a bit more research!

That said though, PC Gamer UK magazine did a review this month (December 09 edition) on page 17 that's worth checking out, a fairly cheap SSD resulted in slightly more than twice as fast loads of a game level (about twice as fast booting up too). So SSDs are still better, since most use isn't of chunks of data as small as 4k - though when picking an SSD it seems to be the most important thing to look for. Won't be even considering this one since they don't share 4k IOPs data (not even dodgy “up to”/“maximum” numbers like OCZ give out which don't match up with actual use benchmarks by reviewers)

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