ADATA Solid State Drives–The Perfect Hard Drive Replacement

productGallery1769Recently I was building myself a new Windows-based computer and the ADATA people came along and offered me a review unit from their new S511 line of Solid State Drives (SSD). If you’ve never heard of an SSD think of it as a USB Flash Drive that’s enormously faster and replaces your computer’s hard drive. All the time that a hard drive takes to spin and seek to find your data is replaced with simple memory accesses in the SSD.  A typical USB Flash Drive is generally 3-4 times slower than what is available on SSDs.  A hard drive is definitely slower than a typical SSD, but is also far less expensive.

Aside from speed, SSDs also offer other advantages. They’re immune to the physical shocks and vibration that can damage a hard drive. They don’t require the same sort of cooling that a hard drive requires to prevent memory loss over time. They’re not sensitive to magnetic fields. They’re smaller. Finally they don’t suffer from the drive fragmentation issues that hard drives have over time.

ADATA’s S511 SSD utilizes the new generation SandForce SF-2200 series controller, with native support for the SATA 6Gb/s platform. The S511 completely brings into play the revolutionary high-speed performance of solid state drives, embracing a new world of transfer performance. With read and write speeds twice that of SSDs using the older SATA II specification, the S511 reached 550/520MB read and write speeds respectively, with 4K random write speeds as high as 85,000 IOPS in real world testing. This means transferring a 5GB video file can be completed in as few as 15 seconds. In actual testing of Windows 7 boot speed, the S511 clocked an impressive 21 second system boot time, giving full satisfaction to the performance needs of power users.

In practical terms this means that the ADATA SSD is quite fast when used with a modern SATA supporting motherboard and with a street price of only $120 the ADATA is a bargain with it’s performance and specifications!

The S511 supports the TRIM command with Windows 7. Basically this means the drive can free up unused space (Free Blocks) for system writes immediately. SSD drives without this can, over time, appear to lose storage memory.  No such problem here!

All purchasers of the S511 can download the free Disk Migration Utility software. It facilitates the quick transfer of all files to the new solid state drive, significantly reducing the troublesome and time-consuming process of reinstalling software and restoring data from backups.

Disk Migration Utility software runs on these operating systems: Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows 7
Software Download Area: http://www.adata-group.com/index.php?action=ss_main&page=ss_software_5

Capacity
60GB/120GB/240GB/480GB

NAND Flash
MLC (Mulit-level cell) Flash

Form Factor
2.5 inch

Dimensions
100 x 69.85 x 9.5mm (L x W x T)

Weight
76g

Performance
60GB Performance
Read : Up to 550MB/S
Write : Up to 500MB/S
4K Random Write (Aligned): 60,000 IOPS
Maximum 4K Random Write : 80,000 IOPS
120GB Performance
Read : Up to 550MB/S
Write : Up to 510MB/S
4K Random Write (Aligned): 60,000 IOPS
Maximum 4K Random Write : 85,000 IOPS
240GB Performance
Read : Up to 550MB/S
Write : Up to 520MB/S
4K Random Write (Aligned): 60,000 IOPS
Maximum 4K Random Write : 85,000 IOPS
480GB Performance
Read : Up to 540MB/S
Write : Up to 460MB/S
4K Random Write (Aligned): 40,000 IOPS
Maximum 4K Random Write : 40,000 IOPS

Operating Temp
0°C ~ 70°C

Storage Temp
-40°C ~ 85°C

Interface
SATA 6Gb/s

Shock Resistance
1500G

Power Consumption
3W active; 0.6W Idle

MTBF
1,000,000hrs

Warranty
3 years

Accessories
2.5" to 3.5" Bracket
Disk Migration Utility