14 DAY TRIAL // ADATA has formally launched a series of solid state drives which, while quite similar to Mushkin's Chronos G2, are nonetheless intended for a completely different segment of the world's demographic.
Which is to say, ADATA isn't aiming for consumers, low on money or otherwise. Instead, it has geared its new solid state drives towards the enterprise market.
Thus, the ADATA SR1010 are the sort of SSDs you can expect to eventually find inside servers, data centers and professional workstations. Well, if you actually bother to look.
Still, even though industrial servers, data centers and embedded devices are supposed to be the primary targets, the drives don't actually have much setting them apart from consumer models.
The specs of the ADATA SR1010 SSDs
First off, the drives are made from MLC NAND Flash memory chips, or multi-level cell as the technology is otherwise known.
Admittedly, ADATA doesn't specifically mention this in the press release, but with relatively high capacities and the transfer speeds being what they are, they can't be made of anything else. SLC (single-level cell) and TLC (triple-level cell) would both lead to different performance parameters.
Speaking of which, there are three SSDs in the SR1010 collection, with 100 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB storage space, respectively. It's actually kind of odd that the first one has 100 GB instead of 120 GB, but we digress.
Performance can reach 550 MB/s both for sequential reading and sequential writing tasks, while random performance is of 73,000 IOPS read (input/output operations per second) and 45,000 IOPS write.
All three storage devices boast Power-Loss Protection, or PLP, a mechanism that prevents data crashes caused by system failures. So if the power grid falls and your data center backup generator is too taxed to handle the sudden load, you won't lose all the data you may have been working on.
Finally, S.M.A.R.T. is supported, a technology that confers upon the SSDs self-monitoring capabilities in regards to integrity and efficiency. Efficiency high enough that ADATA chose to apply green labels to its creations, both literally and figuratively.
Availability
The ADATA SR1010 SSDs ship with 5-year warranties but weren't given prices or an exact ETA. That means, we suppose, that enterprise customers can place orders for them if they contact ADATA directly, and that prices will be subject to order size and deal negotiations.
With a MTBF of 2 million hours, the newcomers should score at least some contracts. Other SSDs “only” have an endurance of 1.5 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures, the time a drive can run without interruption, in layman’s terms).