14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives that use the new SATA interface are hardly many right now, but they definitely exist, and A-Data might just be quite eager to promote its own, one S501, which has begun to ship.
Some six months ago, A-Data gave a brief demonstration of a certain solid state drive that used the SATA 6.0 Gbps technology.
After that, the company kept mostly silent about it, until earlier this month, December, 2010, when they were demonstrated again.
Granted, the demonstration was about not just one SSD, but several, a whole line of them as it were.
To be more specific, four capacity options exist, namely 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB, respectively.
They all are powered by a Marvell controller chip and are constructed out of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips from Toshiba.
Additionally, they feature 128 MB of DDR3 memory, which acts as the drives' cache.
Furthermore, they have full support for the TRIM command, which keeps cleaning up deleted sectors on the units, in order to preserve performance over time.
That said, the maximum read speed attainable is of 480 MB/s, whereas writing can be accomplished at 310 MB/s.
All in all, they are quite highly-performing flash-based storage devices that have already been listed in Europe, according to tcmagazine and ComputerBase.
The 64 GB one has a price of €169.90 Euro, whereas the 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB A-Data S501 solid state drives are priced at 259 Euro, 489 Euro and 1,099 Euro, respectively.
No doubt the company will have some of them on display at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
In fact, one can expect its rivals to have their own SATA 6.0 Gbps SSDs on display as well, even if they don't immediately get around to selling them.