Final Thoughts

Many things have changed since we first started testing SandForce based products in our lab. At one time we were talking about 100GB SF-1200 drives costing up to 600 USD, but that was quickly reduced to 400 then 300 and now pricing for the new 120GB drives has fallen to less than 300 USD. For many enthusiasts the price is now into the commodity level and it isn't a question of if you should purchase a SandForce SF-1200 SSD, but if you should purchase two for RAID or stick to just one.

With prices bottoming out manufacturers have started shifting attention away from performance (which is as high as it can be for a SATA II interface) and started focusing more on added value areas like warranty lengths and included accessories. At a cost of 265 USD from Newegg the A-DATA S599 128GB comes with a health three year warranty and a nice anodized desktop adapter bracket. This isn't the very best price you can find on a SandForce SF-1200, but it is very close, close enough for the S599 to be on your list of potential drives to consider.

When it comes to performance we would like to see SandForce and A-DATA start to focus on data copy performance and see what they can do with compressed data transfer performance specifically. This is an area that will always be difficult for SandForce drives in this series, but we also feel that performance could also be improved here since the older firmware gave nearly a 20% increase over what we are seeing now.