ADATA Displays 2TB SSDs and Much Delayed LSI Controller – Computex 2014 Update

As funny as it may seem, a close friend in the industry was speaking to me regarding the LSI SF3700 controller at a function yesterday where he identified the possibility that LSI SandForce just may miss an entire generation of controllers should their SF3000 be delayed any longer.  Nobody knows that frustration more than the manufacturers who are at Computex this year, once again handcuffed with LSI evaluation samples that still haven’t reached their performance peak.

We will address the exact reasoning for this, as well as what LSI is looking to achieve before taking the strangle hold off of this controller, in an article shortly post our interview with Thad Omura of LSI, but for now, watch for competition that just may be around the corner (Marvel Altaplus). Briefly though, performance has to come up and heat has to come down.  Take a look at this picture and imagine the irony of creating one of the worlds smallest SSDs, yet having to have such a heatsink attached.

Let’s look a something great that ADATA has brought to the forefront of Computex 2014 today though, something the consumer has been asking for for some time now.  This year at Computex is the first time we will see the introduction of 2TB SSDs not only as a mainstream item for enterprise, but also for the consumer.  The beauty of this is that, as the NAND flash memory footprint continues to get smaller, larger capacity SSDs at more reasonable pricing create a great opportunity.

Following a trend we saw a few years ago, ADATA highlighted the strength of their SSDs with respect to vibration and temperature variations, also displaying just how adaptable they can be to customer custom needs.

As much as this appears to be just an attractive display, take a closer look at the solid state drives on the ice…

Also, we can never go wrong with those underwater shots.

One of the drives that we found very impressive was the SR1020 that will be available in capacities up to 2TB, and contains the LSI SandForce SF-3739 controller with performance up to 1.8GB/s reads and writes with 150 K IOPS.

Moving more to the consumer side of things though, check out this 1TB Premier Pro SP910 that has a Marvell controller and is capable of 560MB/s read, 460MB/s write and 91K IOPS:

Stepping away from the SSD side of things for our parting shot, another trend we are seeing this year at Computex seems to be the introduction of low profile memory, such as the ADATA DDR4 2133VLP RDIMM shown here: