ADATA S511 120gb SATA 3 SSD Review: AData adds a ‘SandForce Driven’ 6Gbps SSD To Their Lineup

It was just about a month ago that AData announced their upcoming release of a new 6Gbps SSD which would join the masses of ‘SandForce Driven’ SSDs and, not surprisingly, a sample was in the mail on our return from Computex.

Today we will be ripping apart an AData S511 120GB solid state drive and its only proper to welcome AData to our little corner of the internet as this just so happens to be our first AData SSD inclusion.

The AData S511 family is available in capacities of 60, 120, 240 and 480GB, has a 3 year warranty, and all have relatively similar performance expectations exceeding the equal 500MB/s read and write transfer speeds except for the 480MB SSD which dips in its high sequential write speeds to 460MB/s.

We mention parallel read and write performance because this is a key indicator in understanding that the processor within is part of the ‘SandForce Driven’ family. Whether it be consumer or enterprise, there has yet to be competition of any sort that would try to duplicate SandForces success through compression techniques in storage.  SandForce is the only company to have accomplished less than a 1:1 write ratio which results in close to parallel sequential read and write disk transfer speeds.

PACKAGE AND HARDWARE CHARACTERISTICS

The packaging for the S511 SSD is straight forward and we were happy to see a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter for those wishing to install the SSD in a desktop system.  As we dug a bit deeper, we learned that once available, there will also be a notebook specific kit that will have an external cradle for migration purposes, one that can be used in conjunction with your original hard drive as external storage after the migration is complete.

This all includes complete access to the AData Migration Software that has been compiled through a partnership with Acronis and can be downloaded free of charge from the AData website.

The SSD exterior casing is of a two piece metal design held together with 4 screws, one of which has the expected security tape over it to prevent tampering.  Any opening of the case, of course, will void manufacturer’s warranty.

Inside the case we find a typical SSD PCB (printed circuit board) with the SandForce SF-2281 processor that we spoke of earlier.  We also find 16 modules of Intel 25nm NAND flash memory which total 128GB of raw memory.  As a result of firmware requirements and over provisioning, the total gets reduced to 120GB (or minus one flash module) and formatting leaves the end user with 111.79GB of available data storage.

Pg 1 – Introduction and Physical Characteristics

Pg2 – Testing Protocol and Intial Tests

Pg3 – Crystal DiskMark and AS SSD Benchmarks

Pg4 – HDTunePro Testing

Pg5 – PCMark Vantage Comparisons and Conclusions

FOLLOW OUR FORUM DISCUSSION HERE!