14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwanese memory maker ADATA has just announced the release of a new entry-level solid state drive that is designed especially to be used for SSD caching purposed in conjunction with Intel’s Smart Response enabled motherboards.
The new solid state drive is called the S396 and it will only be available in a single capacity providing users with 30GB of storage space.
While this may seem too small for most purposes, it should fit its role as an SSD cache drive rather nicely since it doesn’t force users to pay for more storage space than necessary.
Performance also seems to be good, although the drive is limited at supporting SATA 3Gbps speeds.
According to ADATA, the S396 was optimized in order to deliver better 4KB transfer speeds as 90% of all the computing tasks run by the operating system involve data packets this size.
This means that the performance of 4KB file transmission plays a critical role in users' experience so the S396 was designed to deliver 44K IOPS (input/output operations per second) when 4KB random writes are involved.
As far as the sequential transfer speeds achieved are concerned, read and write speeds are rated at 280MB/s and 250MB/s, respectively.
ADATA hasn’t said who manufactures the SSD controller used in the S396, but we do know that this includes support for the TRIM command and that is paired with 25nm multi-level cell (MLC) synchronous NAND Flash memory.
No details regarding pricing or availability were made public so far, but we expect the S396 to carry a bargain price.
ADATA bundles together with the S396 solid state drive a 3.5-inch desktop conversion bracket as well as a special software tool for enabling easy data migration.