We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, Leadtek, Corsair, LSI and Noctua.

You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

Today we are looking at A-DATA's S599 100GB SandForce SF-1200 controlled SSD. This is the first drive we have tested with the new Intel 9.6 Rapid Storage Technology driver. You will see today that the new driver increases the performance of the SandForce SF-1200 controller by a very significant amount in PCMark Vantage (Windows HDD Tests). All of the other drives presented in the chart were tested on either the Marvell SATA 6G controller (Crucial RealSSD C300 SATA 6G results) on the basic Microsoft AHCI driver that fully supports Windows 7's TRIM command. Until the 9.6 RST release, Intel SATA drivers did not support TRIM.

There are two points of significance to look for in today's benchmark results. The first has to do with drivers and is between the Corsair F100 and the A-DATA S599. These are the two SandForce SF-1200 drives; one tested with Microsoft base drivers and the other with the new Intel 9.6. This battle is really about the drivers and not so much a true fight between the two. That will come in the next few days.

The second comparison is as true as it gets and this is the battle between the A-DATA S599 with RST 9.6 drivers and the Crucial RealSSD C300 running on the Marvell SATA controller. Since the Marvell SATA controller has not been updated, we are seeing the highest level of performance from the drive as is possible at this time. I have learned that the C300 in 128GB capacity is slower than the 256GB model we tested. When making your purchasing decision, you should keep this in mind. We will talk about this more in the conclusion.

Over the next two weeks we will be retesting our collection of drives to gather performance data of these products with the RST 9.6 driver and get back to true apples to apples comparisons across the board.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

In ATTO we see a nice progressive wave of performance that shows the drive is running normally. At the bottom of the scale we see that the A-DATA S599 is even faster than what A-DATA has claimed in their marketing literature.