Introduction

With the solid state market moving faster than Han Solo trying to escape a fleet of Star Destroyers, we have some instant breaking news for you. It appears that Marvell has reworked their SATA 6G SSD controller and paired it with 128MB of DDR3 cache memory. At the time of writing it looks like the new controller will be able to run in 64, 128, 256 and a massive 512GB capacity configuration.

A-DATA allowed us to shut down a portion of their Computex Booth today for a few hours so we could run some of our standard benchmarks on the new A-DATA S501 pre-production drive. We have to give them a big "Thank You" for allowing this test to take place. Hundreds of people were flowing through the booth and we want to say sorry to those that wanted to see the new drive, but were not able to since we were taking up the space.

We know this is going to be an interesting story and don't want to keep you from the benchmarks, so we will just get right down to the good stuff.