14 DAY TRIAL // There are three new solid-state drives, or SSD series, in ADATA's collection now, one of which comes in the usual 2.5-inch, SATA form factor, while the other two are M.2 NAND Flash storage devices.
The normal SSD, so to speak, is called Premier Pro SP910 and is a 2.5-inch drive powered by the Marvell 88SS9187 controller.
That means that it doesn't leverage the higher throughput of the SATA Express technology, even though it would have done it easily if the 88SS1083 was used instead. So we suppose that it’s “normal” but not in a good way.
In fact, there is no mention of future M.2 drives with SATA Express support in the formal release, and the read/write speeds are pegged at 560/460 MB/s.
Moreover, the 4KB random read/write performance is of 91,000/77,000 IOPS. Rapid, but not to a ground-shaking extent, all told.
All in all, we can safely describe the ADATA Premier Pro SP910 solid-state drive as a good SSD, but not great. Much of the potential of current technology is, after all, disregarded.
If you've got a SATA Express-capable controller, you may as well actually enable support for the technology. Alas, there won't be any 700-800 MB/s speeds on this one. Maybe in the future, some new member will be added that will handle it, but so far no dice.
On that note, the other two SSDs, the Premier Pro SP900 M.2 2422 and 2280, fail to live up to their potential as well.
Not because they're made poorly, but because their M.2 form factor implementation is designed for SATA-based M.2 connections, not PCI Express ones.
Thus, the transfer speeds are limited to 550/530 MB/s read/write instead of coming even close to the fabled 1.8 GB/s we've heard whispers about.
At least all the newcomers support Intel Smart Response Technology (automatically identifies the data and applications most often used, speeding performance).
ECC should be present as well, but we only have certain confirmation for the Premier Pro SP910 which, by the way, come in 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and a massive 1 TB.
Speaking of which, the 2.5-inch SATA drives ship with a 2.5 mm spacer and the 3.5-inch converter, while the M.2 SSDs (128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB) are better suited for ultrabooks. The only visible difference between the Premier Pro SP900 M.2 2422 and 2280 is the size: 22 x 42 mm / 0.86 x 1.65 inches and 22 x 80 mm / 0.86 x 3.14 inches, respectively.
Unfortunately, ADATA did not see fit to include the prices of the new solid-state drives in its product announcement.
