The State Of Solid State: Computex 2015

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By Chris Ramseyer
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Adata

Adata spent a lot of time waiting on SandForce's SF3000 to come to life. Over the last year, it backed away from being a SandForce-only shop and introduced drives with Marvell and Silicon Motion controllers. SandForce's SF3000 was at the Adata booth, but it wasn't getting the attention we've seen in the past. With a new SSD product manager at the helm, Adata plans to attack this space on all fronts with exciting new SATA- and PCIe-based products using several different processors.

We are not spending a lot of time talking about enterprise hardware today, but Intel's U.2 announcement opens the door for 2.5" PCIe x4 SSDs to enter the client SSD market. Adata's SR1020 2TB SSD uses a Marvell PCIe 3.0 x4 controller in a 2.5" form factor. The drive was running at Computex in an add-in card form factor. Sequential read performance is said to be 3200 MB/s, while sequential writes top out around 2000 MB/s.

Power users have always found a way to bring enterprise-class storage products to high-performance workstations. It's a practice that dates all the way back to SCSI, when enthusiasts would boot from Seagate X15 drives for a snappier experience. The new U.2 naming scheme for adapting M.2 makes enterprise storage in desktops easier. 

Most enthusiasts are happy just to have a high-capacity SSD. The Silicon Motion-controlled SM550 from Adata scales to 960GB and uses advanced LDPC error correction code to take Toshiba A19 TLC NAND flash. Expect to see the SP550 before the end of 2015, with pricing under $350 for the 960GB model.

The Adata SP560 uses a similar configuration with TLC NAND flash, but rather a Marvell controller that also supports LDPC. With Adata planning to release both the SP550 and SP560 with similar configurations, it looks like the company plans to introduce a number of different models and see what customers prefer.

Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
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50 Comments Comment from the forums
  • blackmagnum
    The time is ripe to change your old spinning catastrophe and embrace the now of SSD.
    Reply
  • Vivecss
    So have they fixed the data loss if not connected to electricity for more than a week thing?
    Reply
  • synphul
    Spinning catastrophe? My hdd doesn't perform much slower than my ssd for 90% of tasks, the biggest improvement was installing windows. For that I was impressed. An hdd shouldn't be a catastrophe, if it is I'd strongly suggest a better brand/model. Installed an ssd on a workstation and of all the upgrades it was the component I was least happy with. The new cpu and ram upgrade were by far more impressive. Not that I'm 'unhappy' with it, it is a little snappier though not enough to make me rush right out to buy another one for my other rig. If another 240gb ssd goes on sale for $60 like the first one I bought I might consider it. Pcie m.2 look appealing and great on paper but I suppose it would be of greater benefit to someone who is suffering a bottlenecked system due to storage in the first place.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    So have they fixed the data loss if not connected to electricity for more than a week thing?
    Yes, about 5 years ago.
    SSDs are still no archival media, and they will corrupt after a year or two without power. But if you are the sort of person who travels a lot and unplugs your PC for 2-3 months at a time then it is not a real concern anymore.
    Reply
  • wtfxxxgp
    So have they fixed the data loss if not connected to electricity for more than a week thing?

    I'm so out of touch that I didn't even know that was "a thing"

    O.o
    Reply
  • Vivecss
    So have they fixed the data loss if not connected to electricity for more than a week thing?
    Yes, about 5 years ago.
    SSDs are still no archival media, and they will corrupt after a year or two without power. But if you are the sort of person who travels a lot and unplugs your PC for 2-3 months at a time then it is not a real concern anymore.

    Really? 5 years ago? Because I've gone on vacation for about a month and my Windows wont even start anymore. And that was about a year ago. Heard a rumor that the 3D stacking technology thing managed to eliminate this problem and i was waiting for some more good news about that before buying a new SSD.
    Reply
  • CRamseyer
    Spinning catastrophe? My hdd doesn't perform much slower than my ssd for 90% of tasks, the biggest improvement was installing windows. For that I was impressed. An hdd shouldn't be a catastrophe, if it is I'd strongly suggest a better brand/model. Installed an ssd on a workstation and of all the upgrades it was the component I was least happy with. The new cpu and ram upgrade were by far more impressive. Not that I'm 'unhappy' with it, it is a little snappier though not enough to make me rush right out to buy another one for my other rig. If another 240gb ssd goes on sale for $60 like the first one I bought I might consider it. Pcie m.2 look appealing and great on paper but I suppose it would be of greater benefit to someone who is suffering a bottlenecked system due to storage in the first place.

    A $60 240GB SSD is the reason why you don't feel a big performance increase over your HDD.
    Reply
  • WyomingKnott
    "Really? 5 years ago? Because I've gone on vacation for about a month and my Windows wont even start anymore. And that was about a year ago."

    But how old was the SSD? The model, not the particular one that you own.
    Reply
  • synphul
    It was on sale. At the time, ocz vector 150's were going for $180. It stays neck and neck with the samsung 840 evo (850's weren't even available yet) and the two trade blows a bit. The vector 150 has slightly slower random reads and the samsung has slightly slower write speeds. It was chosen for a workstation doing content creation with larger files where write speed was preferred. Maybe people feel such a huge difference over their hdd's because they're using junk hdd's? My wd re4 gives me no issues. The only time aside from bootup that ssd's seem to have a huge performance gain is during testing where a longer sustained data transfer is occurring. Something most people won't encounter under normal use of a pc, instead it will more than likely operate in small bursts. So technically, it was a $180 ssd using the newer 19nm toshiba nand. Hardly a junk ssd.
    Reply
  • CRamseyer
    When you said it I was thinking something along the lines of a V300 with async flash.
    Reply