ADATA SSDs, Memory and Accessories On Show At CES 2014

As part of our CES tour, we are today taking a look around ADATA’s suite in the Venetian Hotel here in Las Vegas, and like a few other vendors, they are keen to show off their latest and greatest technologies to the world. As soon as we enter their suite, we find a test bench setup which is home to a PCIe card that looks rather different to any other PCIe SSD that we have seen before.

On a closer inspection we find that this card is playing home to a next generation mSATA SSD. As seen on the centre of this board, the mSATA SSD is still in development due to the massive heatsink that is placed on top of the drive controller and even though this is an unfinished product, ADATA assure us that the drive is nearing completion and once the heat issue from the controller has been ironed out then we should be starting to see samples appear for review, so we can only look forward to this. The question I hear you all asking though is what makes this drive that much different from any other mSATA drive? Well when we look at mSATA, there is obviously a certain size constraint to stick to, after all the drives are considerably smaller than a traditional SSD. This particular drive is a brand new form of PCIe SSD and with a few tweaks and tunes, it is able to break through the bandwidth limitations of Gen 3 PCIe lanes and speeds of upto 1800MB/s are possible through the new SF3700 controller. Obviously this is not fully refined as of yet, but as and when it is, the market for PCIe SSDs will be opened right up for power users, the enterprise market and laptops alike.

Further along the line we find a number of ADATA’s existing products ranging from memory to mSATA and full SATA SSDs, but there are a couple of products that stand out from the crowd. The first of these is a full 2TB SSD, yes thats a whopping 2TB, labelled under the SX930 product line and this uses the same SF3700 ‘Griffin’ controller that we saw above. Like the image above, this drive is still in development and the drive only has half of its casing in place to make way for a heatsink to cool the controller. Once this technology has been refined however, I do believe that we are looking at the worlds first 2TB 2.5″ SSD.

The second item of interest is this little baby. Now on the face of it, this appears to look like a single NAND flash module that would be installed on to a fully fledged SSD, however the situation could be no more different. What we have here is an entire SSD in an integrated format – yep, thats the NAND, controller and memory all contained within a single package. Now obviously this is not going to appear on the consumer market to buy, but there will be applications within the mobile and tablet markets for this type of drive – thus reducing the size of the product, whilst offering faster speeds and potentially greater capacities.

Further round the ADATA suite, we find that they are now delving a little deeper into the accessory market and as expected this includes power banks for your mobile devices. Now it seems the every man and his dig is produced these banks, but to set themselves apart a little ADATA have got some that are coloured and designed towards the female users, as style is a key factor for some. Besides these a selection of external storage devices and mobile storage devices such as the 1TB DashDrive HV620 that I recently looked at and the DashDrive Air AE400 that I looked earlier last year.

Just around the corner from the SSD lineup ADATA are showing their XPG range of memory, but what we note in particular is the wide array of colours that they are now offering. Many people these days are opting for a colour theme within their system and for memory vendors this can lead to a make or break in terms of sales – after all, if the modules are not the colour, then why would the end user want it for their system. This is where this new bunch of heat-spreaders comes into play. The nine modules that are on show are reportedly only a selection of the colours that will be available so what we now find is that the need to sacrifice memory speed or quality is no longer a choice that has to be made.

Stay tuned as we have far more content for you from our trip to this years Consumer Electronics Show.