14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since they were first introduced to the market, SSDs managed to achieve impressive performance results that blew away everything to come before them, but since enthusiasts always want more from their hardware, A-Data is preparing to launch the S501 SSD, recent firmware improvements managing to further increase this drives performance.
Showcased for the first time all the way back in June during Computex Taipei, the S501 is one of the upcoming SATA-III solid state drives that are bound to be released in 2011, further improving the performance numbers that we see from SSDs.
During Computex Taipei some hardware reviewers managed to take a quick look at the drives performances and found it to be capable of reaching around 408MB/s read speeds and 220MB/s write speeds.
However impressive these numbers may sound, TweakTown states that during a visit to A-Data's headquarters in Taipei, they got to witness a S501 SSD running a stable and near shipping firmware version that pushed the drive's performances to achieve 460MB/s read and 325MB/s write transfer speed.
These performance numbers are well beyond what regular SSDs may achieve (SandForce or any other controller based), putting it in RAID 0 territory.
Even more impressive is the fact that these performance numbers are reached without using any sort of internal RAID modes, A-Data's S501 coming as a 256GB 2.5-inch drive that makes use of Toshiba's 34nm flash modules and a Marvell controller.
Although A-Data didn't reveal any more information regarding the Marvell controlled used in this SSD, the company did state that higher transfer speeds could be achieved by using faster 25nm flash NAND cells that are bound to show up in 2011.
While these are all the details that we have for now, the S501 SSD is expected to ship pretty soon, A-Data planning to release this drive during CES 2011.