14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drive manufacturer ADATA has just announced that its SSD solutions are used by Asus in the recently launch UX21 and UX31 series of Zenbook, making ADATA one of the few hardware makers to gain access into the Ultrabook world.
The drives that are used in Asus' latest creations come from the XM11 mSATA SSD series and include second generation SF-2281 controllers built by SandForce.
These feature native support for the SATA 6Gbps interface and were designed to deliver impressive sequential rad and write transfer speeds as well as high 4K random access performance.
In the UX21 and UX31 Zenbooks, Asus uses XM11 drives with capacities of 128GB and 256GB, their low-profile making them a great option for these ultra-thin notebooks.
Outside of the ADATA XM11 solid state drives, Asus' Ultrabooks also feature Intel Core i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge ultra-low voltage processors which are paired together with 4GB of system memory.
The rest of the specs list includes USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, stereo speakers with Bang and Olufsen's ICEpower technology, a 11-inch screen with a resolution of 1366x768 pixels in the UX21 and a 13-inch 1600x900 display in the UX31.
Run time is estimated at five hours for the Zenbook UX21, while its older brother can go up to seven hours without requiring a recharge.
The ZenBooks will be available in five versions, two for the UX21 and three for the UX31, and prices start at $999 (€732) for the UX21E-DH52, which comes equipped with an Intel Core i5-2467M processor and an 128GB SSD.
All these are packed inside an all-aluminum body with glass trackpads and an all-metal keyboard.
Thanks to the powerful configuration and most probably also due to the high-speed ADATA SSD drives used, the Zenbook claim an impressive 2-second resume from stand-by time.