AData first to market with fresh SSDs – Sandforce error free

Right now, everything about SSDs is sexy and exciting, so when the new Sandforce 2281 controller was rumoured – enthusiasts across the world worked extra shifts in their local comic book stores – ready to pay for it. It went wrong, but now it seems that the issues have been dealt with. KitGuru snoops around the harbours to see what's shipping.

Back in the golden days of the PC, somewhere in the late 90s, overall performance was so weak that every new CPU, GPU or chipset would cause benchmark records to be smashed. It was an exciting time and anyone who scanned the pages of the old magazines for tales of FX, VX and TX would, at the same time, be searching their mainboards for pipeline, burst mode cache. Things got so out of hand, that at one stage, unscrupulous mainboard factories were soldering in 'empty chips' to pretend that they had the feature.

That was then and this is now.

These days, the thought of a slightly smaller/thinner/faster mobile device which will plug you into your ‘friends and the local Apple App Store', is enough to create queues a mile long.

Nothing in the PC technology arena has that effect. Well, almost nothing.

The new Sandforce 2281 controller was different. Something special. It would, in one move, allow read/write speeds that were only possible before with RAID configurations. In those terms, even the early products from OCZ were very reasonably priced.

Unfortunately, for a small number of customers, there was a firmware issue that created intermittent problems. These have been well documented and there is a solution. However, the issue has not really slowed consumer demand for ultra-high performance SSD. We find it so hot/alluring, that even when we know that there's an element of danger, we're thinking “Sure, but that's a problem that only affects other people”.

So the news that AData's latest batch of 525MB read 500MB write drives – complete with the required firmware fix – should be met with smiles.

KitGuru spies managed to get (camera) eyes on part of an early shipment, headed for the special projects team at Asus.

KitGuru says: With Corsair, OCZ and everyone else who's on the Sandforce bandwagon due to follow suite, this shipment of working SSDs is great news for high-end system builders who are looking for a little less danger than previously available.

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