Final thoughts and rating

The ADATA S511 60GB SSD is a consummate performer in its own right. Super-fast in applications that take advantage of data which can be compressed through the drive's DuraWrite technology, it falters to being, in mid-2011, an average performer if your dataset uses lots of compressed files.

Priced at an attractive £105 for an SSD that's large enough to function as most people's boot-drives, adding a second and RAIDing them produces benchmarks that can be off the scale - just thinking of 1GB/s read speeds should be whetting appetites.

You can purchase cheaper same-capacity drives, absolutely, and deciding to run a single 120GB drive may make sense to a lot of people, but we feel that ADATA has priced the S511 range at levels which encourage enthusiasts to think seriously about running two drives for ultimate performance, albeit without explicit performance-restoring TRIM support in situ.

Second-generation SandForce SSDs are now available from a number of established players. ADATA's, represented by the S511 family, offer top-line performance and a tempting price-tag for a couple of 60GB models.

We recommend readers evaluate just what they need from an SSD before purchasing. If it's stupendous speed from mainly large-file transfers, put a couple of ADATA S511 60GB drives very near the top of your list.

The Good

Gobs of performance for compressible data
Solid GB-per-pound metric for two drives, given the speed

The Bad

Lose TRIM support with RAID
Some of the competition offer five-year warranties

HEXUS Rating

ADATA S511 (60GB)

HEXUS Awards

ADTA S511 (60GB)

HEXUS Where2Buy

The ADATA S511 60GB SSD can be purchased for £105, including delivery, from Amazon.co.uk.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Wow!

I've got 2xM225 128Gb Crucial drives in Raid 0 and have been happy with the performance for the past year, but this makes me look at my crddit card and think about going to town. I'm simply stunned.

Good to see them breaking the 1Gb/s mark.
But what we need is higher capacity 400mb/s+ SSDs with a better gb/£, the gulf between the speed of older HDDs is getting bigger, so relying on them for mass storage is evidently slower.

brasc

I'm intrigued that these drives seem to be tuned for better random write performance than random read performance. Surely you'd need a fairly specific workload for that to be advatnageous?

CAn't find this promotional price on amazon.co.uk that was listed at the end of the article….

1GB/s sequential isn't everything though, the IOPS is lower and it's beaten out in other tests by alternative configurations.

Many commentators have remarked that outside of benchmarks it's hard to tell the difference between any modern SSD solution, and any will be much faster than a spinning disk. I question the sense in RAID 0 when you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference in everyday use from a 128GB m4.