ADATA SP300 24GB mSATA SSD Review

Whilst mSATA drives are not a new technology and have been around for a little while now, this does happen to be the first one that we have looked at. As we have highlighted, there are two main uses for mSATA drives and whilst in the notebook market they are commonly seen as primary storage, the SP300 is more geared for the desktop market where drive caching is more common.

Looking at the drives performance, it would have been nice to see this as a SATAIII device to push the performance a little further, although the SF-2141 controller is the limiting factor stopping this from going that far, but at the same time, current integration of mSATA onto motherboards is limited to SATAII. As soon as we see onboard mSATA starting to run at SATAIII speeds, then it would be nice to see a faster revision of this drive. For what is on offer though and given its pretty low price point, this would be a great first step onto the caching ladder, utilising Intel’s Smart Response Technology to cache a mechanical boot drive.

On the note of caching, you will note that we didn’t test this in the exact same way and there is a good reason for that. ISRT doesn’t work in the same way that the likes of DataPlex does, making the cache drive invisible to the OS. By this the mSATA drive can still be seen as a usable storage drive within Windows, although we would advise against using it, as this would hinder caching performance.

As far as caching performance goes, we did not a significant improvement in the boot time of our test bench with a fresh copy of Windows installed on a 3TB Seagate Barracuda. After a couple of boot cycles, we noted boot times dropping from around the twelve second mark down to around seven seconds. Within Windows program load times were a little faster, however HDTach was unable to record any difference, most likely to the way the cache is setup via ISRT.

On the whole, whilst this is a great start onto the mSATA market for caching purposes, I would perhaps consider looking at the larger capacity 32GB and 64GB drives to maximise the caching capabilities however for around the £37/$60 (USD) you can get a feel for what is on offer. If you’re after the little bit extra from the go, or a drive that is for dedicated storage rather than caching, then the SX300 series of drives are also available which offer up a SATA 6Gbps interface (ideal for ultrabooks) and naturally higher read and write speeds.