Introduction

ADATA isn't new to the SATA III market. The company already released the S501; a Marvell controlled SATA III drive with good wear capabilities. The S501 was a stopgap product between ADATA's successful S599 SandForce SF-1200 drive and the new S511 featuring SandForce's latest flagship, the SF-2281.

There's been a lot of talk about synchronous vs. asynchronous flash lately thanks to an article I wrote here. The ADATA S511 uses synchronous flash, the good stuff. ADATA doesn't mention this information on their website and I'm not sure why. Synchronous flash performs better across the board even though most armature blog sites will tell you that only compressed data is affected.

In the past ADATA has competed for the price / performance crown and the new S511 is no exception. ADATA is already very competitive with products like the Vertex 3, Force GT and other comparable synchronous flash products on the market today. The question we're going to answer today is if the ADATA S511 also competes with the massive performance of other synchronous flash drives sporting SandForce SF-2281 controllers.