Introduction

ADATA is mostly known for its high end DDR memory aimed at the enthusiast market, which is a shame because they manufacture some other memory products that are really good and sell for a decent price. One of these not so known memory types that A-DATA produces is the Super Info SD Series cards. The special thing about these cards is that they have a small display on the back that can display some useful information.

Today I will be taking a look at the A-DATA Super Info SD 512MB card.

Specifications from ADATA Technology:

SD with EPD to show its availability capacity
Bi-stable EPD without embedded battery
Support the interface of the Secure Digital Card Standard
Support Error Correcting Code (ECC) function to detect and correct errors
Support In System Programming (ISP) function to load the firmware
Support Wear Leverage function to maximize data endurance

The Package

ADATA ships its cards in a standard hard blister pack. The Super Info SD card isn't bundled with any accessories. The specifications list is on the front of the package and you can see what special features this card has and that it doesn't require a battery to power the embedded display.

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The card doesn't come with any accessories besides from a hard plastic carrying case.

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Closer Examination

One of the special things about this particular SD card is the fact that it has a small display on the back. The display can show the name which you have assigned to it via windows explorer and the remaining capacity of the card.

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The display shows 2 characters that you can assign to it, by default the card is named SD (Secure Digital). After the two characters there are 4 numbers which together show the remaining capacity in MB of the card.

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Above you can see the display in action, I loaded a picture onto the card from my PC and set the name of the drive to FS which are my initials. The little display is quite clear and calculator style. It doesn't require any battery to work because it's a stable LCD display. I think that the little display is a nice idea which it makes it easy for you to label your SD cards, and get a quick overview of capacity without having to insert it into a PC or digital camera.

Performance

To test the capabilities of this Super Info SD card. I connected it to my PC via a SanDisk 12-in-1 card reader which is isn't a bottleneck for performance since it can cope with almost 40MB/s bandwidth. To bench the memory cards I have used HDTach 2.7 which is a really good benchmark program that not only measures the bandwidth of the card but also calculates CPU usage and response time of the card.

In order to test the cards with different package sizes I have used ATTO benchmark system which generates multiple scenarios with different package sizes and measures the read and write performance of the card.

The card will be benched against my A-DATA 1GB reference card and the new OCZ Secure Digital Dual 1GB. A-DATA doesn't list this card's speed anywhere, so one could get an idea that they have something to hide, but after many benchmarks I can only conclude that this isn't the case. This card performs just as good and even better in some scenarios than the OCZ and my A-DATA reference card.

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This card really performs and almost out did my 1GB ADATA card in the read speed test done in HDTach 2.70, read bandwidth was really good at 11.9MB/s, which equals 80x speed by the old calculation method (150KB/s * 80 :1000=12MB/s). This card easily outperformed the OCZ card in the read bandwidth category by almost 4MB/s.

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The Random Access Time (RAT) of this card is the best I have ever seen by a SD-card, the random access time was a mere 1.3ms which is very good for a SD-card. With such a good RAT this card would be ideal to spice up the load time of Windows Vista, if you i.e. have a laptop with a SD-card reader.

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As you can see from this screenshot of HDTach 2.70, the card has a very smooth performance curve which means that the read bandwidth is the same across the entire medium.

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The ATTO benchmark was run with the default configuration. In ATTO the card performed just a little bit worse than the OCZ Secure Digital Dual 1GB. The write speed of the card was way below that of the OCZ card. Another area of performance where the A-DATA card is a bit behind, is the read speeds when the chunk of data are large.

Value & Conclusion

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The ADATA Super Info SD 512MB retails for about $40.

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Design
Read/Write Performance
Display
Access time

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Price
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The ADATA Super Info SD series card definitely brings some nice new features to the SD-card market. One of the great things about this card besides from the excellent performance is the display that can display two characters of your choice and the remaining capacity on the card. Because you can assign two characters it's easy to label your card and you won't have to insert the card in order to get an idea of what's on it.<br />
When it comes to performance the ADATA Super info SD series cards won't let you down. The read speed is really high and so is the write speed although not on pair with the OCZ Secure Digital Dual's write speed. The benchmark in which the ADATA card is unrivaled is access time. At only 1.3ms random access time this card is the most responsive of all the cards that I have tested and had. Because the latency is so low this card could be the perfect buy for some one wanting to speed up Vista boot times, the fact that it's so small makes it a reasonable upgrade for a Vista laptop, because you can keep it inserted in the laptop at all times.<br />
Overall I like the idea of the Super Info SD cards, the display is a welcome addition to a SD card making it easy to label your data and keep track of remaining memory. The downside of the display is the added cost of the card, but I really think that it's worth the added price.
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