14 DAY TRIAL // Right after Intel announced its 311-series Larson Creek solid state drives for the company's Smart Response enabled motherboards, it became clear that other SSD makers will follow on Intel's footsteps and release similar products, and the first company to do so is ADATA.
The company's new Smart Response drives were presented at the Computex 2011 fair and use the mSATA form factor.
While this isn't as widespread as the regular SATA interface, mSATA is available in a wide series of laptops and, recently, Gigabyte has also launched a range of Z68-boards that feature such a slot.
The ADATA solid state drives were released into the ISFM series and the company actually built two different models.
The first one of these is called the ISFM-XM13 and is driven by a SandForce SF-1200 series controller.
This is coupled with either 30GB or 60GB of MLC NAND Flash memory, and, even though some of the memory channels available have been left unpopulated, the drive is capable of reaching transfer rates of up to 250MB/s read and 170MB/s write.
The second SSD model to be released is called the ISFM-IXM01. This features a controller that seems to be fabricated by JMicron.
Unlike its predecessor, which uses only MLC NAND, the ISFM-IXM01 is available with both single-level and multi-level cell memory, depending on the capacity of the drive.
The SLC NAND Flash is reserved for lower capacity SSDs, ranging from 2 to 16 GB in size, while MLC models can feature 32, 64, or 128 GB of storage space.
Performance also varies between the two versions, as SLC drives are rated at 90MB/s both read and write, while the MLC edition offers 150MB/s read and 120MB/s write transfer speeds.
No details regarding pricing or availability were released by ADATA.
Finally, it's important to note that Intel's Smart Response technology doesn't support SSDs that feature less than 18GB of storage space. (via TechPowerUp)
