14 DAY TRIAL // DRAM modules and NAND Flash maker ADATA, recently announced the introduction of the S510 solid state drive, which is meant to come as budget-friendly alternative to the company's more expensive S511 drive series.
Just like its older brother, the S510 SSD is built around a SF-2200 integrated controller built by SandForce, enabling the drive to offer native support for the SATA 6Gbps interface.
The SandForce IC comes with a total of eight memory channels that ADATA chose to populate with cheaper, but also slower, asynchronous NAND Flash.
Similar configurations were also used by the company'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 and the Mushkin Chronos.
Fortunately, the performance hit isn't as severe as one would think and the drives 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).
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.
As all SF-2200-based drives, the ADATA S510 supports the SandForce proprietary DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies.
The S510 will be available in 120GB capacities, but sadly, ADATA refrained itself from providing any information regarding the release date and price of the S510 solid state drive.
Besides the drive itself, the S510 is shipped together with a 2.5 to 3.5-inch adapter bracket as well as with a disk migration utility.