ADATA S501 World's Fastest SSD Could Be 1.8"

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - You might remember that we tested what may end up being the world's fastest SSD at ADATA's Computex booth last week. The next day we went back and picked the drive up to do some additional testing on Cameron's X58A-UD7 and set his system up to the same specs as my dual test systems based on the same motherboard and Intel 975 EE processor. AVADirect supplied Cameron's and my Intel 975 EE procs.



The ADATA S501 128GB in engineering sample form is actually a 1.8" drive that rests in a 2.5" case. No word if a true 1.8" drive will be available but with the S501 hitting just over 400MB/s read speeds wouldn't it be something to have the world's fastest drive selling in the 1.8" form factor.



With my camera packed and ready for the 24 hour flight home I broke out the scanner to take the images above. Here you can see the 2.5" case and the 1.8" drive.

The controller is from Marvell and it shares the same initial model number as those found on the Crucial RealSSD C300. The revision number on the back end of the string show it to be a different revision and the ES printed on the chip tells us that it is an engineering sample chip. Since we know that the 128GB C300 performs a little slower than the 256GB model we are very excited to see what the 256GB S501 is capable of.

At this time we are not sure how long the wait will be but one thing is for sure, the wait will be worth it.