A-DATA Introduces Industry's Fastest SSD S596

[btarunr]

A-DATA Technology Co., Ltd., the worldwide leader in DRAM memory and Flash application products, announced today its industry-leading SSD S596, a 2.5” SATA 3 Gb/s SSD designed specifically for PC enthusiastic, multi-task and heavy-graphic users to perform assorted applications five times faster.

Delivering sequential read and write speed up to 250 MB/sec and 180 MB/sec, the S596 eases the bottleneck conventional HD causes. The S596 utilizes the next generation of Flash technology and DDR2 SDRAM cache buffer to provide an amazingly fast boot-up time at 20 seconds on platforms running Windows 7, a 40% performance improvement compared to platform equipped with ordinary SSD.

Designers and heavy PC users liberated
Ever wonder why a system equipped nothing but grade A components never quite keep up with one’s expectation? Simply put, the HD running averagely between 30~50MB/sec is choking the process. With A-DATA’s S596, one can multi task and switch between graphic-editing software such as Photoshop, illustrator, AutoCAD, or 3D max gracefully with only one fourth (1/4) of the original processing time. No more tiresome waiting!

Capacity available at 64, 128, and 256GB, the S596 is completely in compliance with Windows 7 and Mac Snow Leopard. A mini USB port that comes with S596 extends the use of the SSD to become a secondary external hard drive. S596 is indeed a perfect solution for PC enthusiastic, multi-task, and graphic designers.

[Izliecies]

Better than Intel X25-M?

[wolf]

SSD's are really stating to take off now, Might get a pair for raid early next year, there's a nice amount of choice now.

[Johnny5]

I would love to have a a pair of SSD but I have diapers and mouth's to feed.

[Mussels]

250/180MB/s sounds good


methinks the key lies in these buffers, to prevent the write stutters

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Mussels

methinks the key lies in these buffers, to prevent the write stutters

They've fixed the the stuttering problem by just not using that JMicron controller anymore (although more cache did help the problem with that particular controller). Any drive without the JMicron JMF602 controller shouldn't stutter unless someone took a technologic step backward.

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

They've fixed the the stuttering problem by just not using that JMicron controller anymore (although more cache did help the problem with that particular controller). Any drive without the JMicron JMF602 controller shouldn't stutter.

many do - just not that badly.

its how MLC works, small writes will always cause problems, unless they have a large, fast, buffer/write cache

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Mussels

many do - just not that badly.

its how MLC works, small writes will always cause problems, unless they have a large, fast, buffer/write cache

That's news to me, can you identify any particular ones? I thought that anything made after that first (and second) round of drives with the JMicron controller was good to go only because I hadn't heard of any reports of stuttering.

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

That's news to me, can you identify any particular ones? I thought that anything made after that first (and second) round of drives with the JMicron controller was good to go only because I hadn't heard of any reports of stuttering.

the whole OS grinding to a halt is gone, but they still suffer from very poor write speeds when dealing with small files.

if you look around, you'll find that to be the case with all MLC based SSD's - go google the difference between MLC and SLC, and it'll be explained easily enough

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Mussels

the whole OS grinding to a halt is gone, but they still suffer from very poor write speeds when dealing with small files.

if you look around, you'll find that to be the case with all MLC based SSD's - go google the difference between MLC and SLC, and it'll be explained easily enough

Well that is a whole different issue entirely! Stuttering is a result of the controller not doing its job properly. The slower write speads is (as you mentioned) a problem inherent with the flash memory technology used and more cache is never going to help write speeds. Until there is a new discovery in the flash memory field, things aren't going to be drastically different.

Having "very poor" write speeds is all relative too. Compared to an average hard drive, a good MLC based SSD still does pretty good, just not as good as you would expect relative to the performance of the SSD in every other type of test; making it seem "very poor".

[DaJMasta]

Originally Posted by btarunr

The S596 utilizes the next generation of Flash technology and DDR2 SDRAM cache buffer to provide an amazingly fast boot-up time at 20 seconds on platforms running Windows 7, a 40% performance improvement compared to platform equipped with ordinary SSD.

I'm pretty sure my X25-M boots windows in less than 20 seconds. Haven't clocked it but It's not much longer if it is.


Also, saying SSDs have poor write speeds is not really considering the competition. Sure, the slower of the two speeds is the write speed, but compared to a standard drive or a raptor, 150MB/s sustained is way more than standard drives can offer in write speed. The biggest difference with SSDs is the access time anyways, so even if your SSD has similar performance numbers as a standard drive, it will fell significantly faster because it will be better able to use that peak amount and avoid the seeking which bogs down a normal drive.

[WarEagleAU]

Anything from OCZ, Patriot, and even Corsair out perform Intels 2 series of SSDs in read and writes, but not latency and one other point. Well, I cant say the X E series, I think they have better reads there, but these are from numbers taken from MaximumPC and CPU magazine.

[sol.fides]

the jmicron controller was the one that had abysmal "4kb random writes." It was soo bad hard drives far outperformed it. .02mb/s with a latency of over 1 second.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=3531&p=17

but that age has past. heres a 4kB random write current graph. notice the raptor at 1.5mB/s much higher than jmicron's .02mB/s. and that some mlc based will outperform slc based on the controller used.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3667&p=6

[HighEndToys]

You guys are really going to have to get your hands on some SSDs. The small file write problems have been gone for quite a while. I am testing some Seagate 15K.7's and my SSDs blow them out of the water in ALL tests.

Windows 7 with a TRIM enabled SSD (INDILINX) is really good. If you are running an Intel SSD then then you pretty much get 80 MB/s all of the time in write speeds doing real world stuff.

TweakTown does a ton of SSD reviews

If you are going to run RAID then you will want a Samsung controlled drives since they handle clean up in hardware. If you are going to run a single drive then an Intel or Indilinx controller will work great.

The higher the capacity the faster the drive will be also.

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by HighEndToys

You guys are really going to have to get your hands on some SSDs. The small file write problems have been gone for quite a while. I am testing some Seagate 15K.7's and my SSDs blow them out of the water in ALL tests.

Windows 7 with a TRIM enabled SSD (INDILINX) is really good. If you are running an Intel SSD then then you pretty much get 80 MB/s all of the time in write speeds doing real world stuff.

TweakTown does a ton of SSD reviews

If you are going to run RAID then you will want a Samsung controlled drives since they handle clean up in hardware. If you are going to run a single drive then an Intel or Indilinx controller will work great.

The higher the capacity the faster the drive will be also.

if you send me one, i will happily tell everyone how awesome SSD's you are

[iiee]

250/180 is marketing tricks, what we want to see is random read/write & IOPs.