Legit Storage Reviews

ADATA S596 128GB JMicron JMF612 SSD Review

Manufacturer: A-DATA
Product: AS596B-128GM-C
Date: Tue, Jun 22, 2010 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Joe Evans -
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A Look Inside The ADATA S596

First off, we had to break the dreaded warranty sticker which, of course, is not something you should do at home for obvious reasons. It lies directly over one of the screws on the side. While we are on the subject of screws, this is the first SSD I can recall coming across that uses screws on the side of the case rather than on the back plate. Not good or bad, just different.

ADATA S596 WARRANTY STICKER

On one side of the PCB we see two neat rows of four NAND flash chips. Added to the chips we will see on the other side, we have a total of 128GB of capacity.

ADATA S596 INSIDE

The NAND itself is Intel branded and of the MLC 34nm variety that we are seeing in almost all the new SSD's. Intel and Micron have this manufacturing process down and are pumping out some serious flash memory.

ADATA S596 NAND

Flipping it over, we find the aforementioned other eight MLC NAND chips configured in close proximity to the drive controller and cache.

ADATA S596 INSIDE

The controller in this case is a JMicron JMF612 which we have seen before on other drives (see table on the next page) - all of which support the TRIM function. It generally performs well but seems to be slightly behind the Indilinx controllers in performance and even more so behind the Sandforce controllers. The Elpida 64MB DDR2-800 DRAM cache is adjacent the controller which buffers the data during operation much like the cache on a traditional platter hard drive.

ADATA S596 CONTROLLER

Next Page - The Test System


Review Index
Page 1 - ADATA S596 128GB SSD Intro
Page 2 - A Look Inside The ADATA S596
Page 3 - The Test System
Page 4 - ATTO v2.41 & AS SSD Benchmarks
Page 5 - HD Tune Pro v4.01
Page 6 - HD Tach v3.0.4.0 & CrystalDiskMark v3.0
Page 7 - PCMark Vantage & SiSoft Sandra 2010
Page 8 - Capacity, Final Thoughts & Conclusions