ADATA Shows Off XU41 Mini SSD, SF-3700 Driven 2TB SSD, DDR4 and New XPG Colors
We stopped by the ADATA hotel suite at CES 2014 and we stopped by to see what they were showing off this year. We were impressed by how much ADATA had to offer, so we’ll be focusing on their SSD and DRAM solutions today!
One of the really neat things that ADATA had on display in their booth this year at CES 2014 was their XU41 SI-uSSD or mini solid state drive. This tiny BGA package solution measures 16 x 20 mm and contains both the NAND Flash and controller on the single chip! The performance on this SATA III 6Gbps solution also isn’t that bad with rated sequential read and write speeds of up to 400 MB/s and 180 MB/s respectively. It was also have 4K random writes of up to 20K IOPS. These aren’t crazy high-end speeds and this solution won’t saturate the SATA III bus, but they are respectable and this is a very compact solution! The ADATA XU41 comes in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities and will also support NCQ, TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. ADATA expects all sorts of small devices to use this solution due to the space savings that it offers.
ADATA was showing off a number of M.2 SSD’s, formerly known as NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor), and we were able to check out an upcoming m.2 drive that was running the LSI SandForce SF-3700 controller. Note the SF-3700 controller has a small heatsink on it and that ADATA had an 80mm case fan blowing air across this demo card. LSI SandForce sent all of the CES 2014 demo SSDs with firmware running at 100%, so it was all about performance and not power efficiency. This controller is said to easily reach 1800 MB/s sequential read and write speeds, so get ready to saturate the PCIe x4 bus when these drives come out in the summer.
We also got a chance to see the ADATA XPG SX930 2TB 2.5″ SATA III 6Gbps SSD! ADATA expects this drive to come out this summer, so chances are that it uses the LSI SandForce SF-3700 controller due to it being released around the same time period that it comes out.
ADATA also showed us a PCI Express SSD with LSIs new SF-3700 controller, but they weren’t running it in the booth when we were there due to NDA issues. From we heard later heard, those issues were cleared up and ADATA was showing maximum read transfer rates of right around 1800MB/s, which is what we were seeing at meetings with other companies.
Our photo didn’t come out that good, but ADATA was showing off some DDR4 2133MHz modules for the server market that had CL15 timings. Desktop DDR4 modules are still a bit off, so most company’s were just showing off server memory.
ADATA was also showing off all the different colors that they could do for their next generation of CPG memory modules. They had on display black, blue, gold, red, burnt orange, green, gun metal, purple and matte white.
We really liked the purple color that they came up with as it is something we haven’t seen done before. We like when companies try to be different, so we hope that ADATA releases some of these new colors in 2014!