14 DAY TRIAL // Introduced at the beginning of September, ADATA's budget-oriented S510 SSD based on a SandForce 6Gbps controller has now become available four purchase from a wide selection of retailers, including Newegg.
The new ADATA SSD is almost identical with its older brother, the S511, but the company chose to pair the SandForce controller used with cheaper, but also slower, asynchronous NAND Flash.
This enabled it to lower the price of the S510, without having to give up on SATA 6Gbps support or on any of the features that usually come standard in SandForce-based drives.
Similar configurations were also used by ADATA's competitors to deliver budget-friendly SandForce drives, and some of the most well-known models to go this route are the OCZ Agility 3, the Corsair Force 3 and the Mushkin Chronos.
Fortunately, the performance hit isn't as severe as one would think and the drive can still achieve sequential write speeds of up to 510MB/s, while sequential reads are rated at 550MB/s in ATTO Diskmark.
According to ADATA, maximum 4K random write performance should reach 85,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) when the data written is compressed using SandForce’s write amplification reduction algorithm.
The rest of the specification sheet lists an idle and active power consumption of 0.6W and 4.7W, respectively, while MTBF is estimated at 1.0 million hours.
Like all SF-2200-based drives, the ADATA S510 supports the SandForce proprietary DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies.
ADATA has released only one S510 SSD model that offers 120GB of storage space which is shipped together with a 2.5 to 3.5-inch adapter bracket as well as with a disk migration utility.
The ADATA S510 solid state drive is already available from online retailers such as Newegg, which retails the SSD for $189.99 without shipping, which roughly translates into 141 Euros.