ADATA CES Suite Tour: PCIe & TLC SSDs, Power-Loss Protection Demo, 256GB SD Cards, USB 3.1 And More
by Kristian Vättö on January 12, 2015 1:46 PM EST
I stopped by ADATA's suite last week to see what the company has been up to in the past six months. While ADATA didn't release or announce anything new at the show, there were plenty of upcoming products on display in the suite.
The SP320 will be ADATA's first TLC NAND based SSD and will be available sometime in the first half of 2015. It's based on Silicon Motion's new SM2256 controller, which supports LDPC error correction that increases the endurance (basically, LDPC can deal with a lot higher error rate compared to traditional BCH error correction). Capacities will range from 120GB to all the way to up to 960GB, but the exact specifications are unknown at this point.
Moving on to PCIe, ADATA was showcasing industrial SSDs based on JMicron's JMF811 and JMF810 controllers. The JMF811 is the full-fledged version with four PCIe 2.0 lanes, whereas the JMF810 is capped to two lanes. Capacities go up to 1TB in M.2 2280 form factor and I was told that the drive is already shipping to ADATA's industrial partners. Obviously, the drive is not a retail version (hence the awkward name), but I wouldn't be surprised to see a client version with the same controller showing up later.
Similar to Computex, ADATA was also demoing the SandForce SF3700 based SR1020. To be honest, I don't really have anything new to share on the SF3700. The live demo ADATA was showing in the suite was just sequential writes, which we have already seen before for a few times. Timing wise Seagate/SandForce is now aiming for Computex 2015, so expect to see a ton of new SSD announcements and releases around June time.
In addition to products, ADATA was showing a neat power-loss protection test platform. The platform consists of a custom PCB that plugs into a USB port along with a special software that interrupts power delivery. The purpose of the demo was to show off ADATA's enterprise SR1010 SSD with full power-loss protection, but ADATA also promised to send us the test platform for use in future reviews.
ADATA was also showcasing a couple of USB 3.0 drives with unique security features. The first one was the UE720, which is otherwise a typical USB 3.0 drive but features a fingerprint scanner to provide an extra layer of security.
The other one was the UC520, which uses Bluetooth 4.0 for security. I'm not sure how exactly the encryption works with Bluetooth, but I assume the drive needs to create a Bluetooth connection with a known computer/tablet/smartphone before the contents can be accessed.
For SD cards ADATA has a new UHS-II type XPG SDXC card with capacity of up to 256GB. The card offers read speeds of up to 150MB/s and is capable of 4K2K recording.
ADATA was also displaying a USB 3.1 compatible SE700 external drive with dual SSDs inside. Sequential performance goes above 800MB/s and the drive will be ready to ship once USB 3.1 platforms are available later this year.
ADATA was one of Intel's original DDR4 launch partners and since the launch ADATA has been able to up the speeds to DDR4-3333.
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Vanburen - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Hi Kristian, It would be really cool if AnandTech included a section on how a reviewed SSD handles power-loss, in future SSD reviews.I've always assumed that when a SSD reports data as written to the OS that it was safely written to non-volatile memory. Which doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm now wondering how easily a file system can become corrupted on certain SSD's, in the event of power loss. I guess this is one area that HDDs have an advantage?
merikafyeah - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Yeah, HDDs are definitely more resilient against corruption in the event of sudden power loss since data is stored magnetically rather than electrically. But against making blanket statements regarding SSDs in general, the truth is, individual design decisions play a huge role in how graceful an SSD will behave in worst case scenarios:http://www.extremetech.com/computing/169124-the-my...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ssd-power-faults-...
Some SSDs are more tolerant to electrical mayhem, others, not so much. Unfortunately the number of less resilient SSDs outnumber the sturdier ones, but time may change that.
Jeffrey Bosboom - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Here's a paper from 2013 describing various SSD power loss failure modes observed in actual testing: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fas...Vanburen - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
That is an interesting paper, thanks for sharing. Given it was published in 2013, I wonder if there has been any significant improvement since then.The last paragraph of the conclusion is pretty scary:
"Because we do not know how to build durable systems that can withstand all of these kinds of failures, we recommend system builders either not use SSDs for important information that needs to be durable or that they test their actual SSD models carefully under actual power failures beforehand. Failure to do so risks massive data loss"
I hope SSD manufacturers really take this on-board. SATA SSDs are certainly fast enough nowadays, maybe they can spend some more resources on improving reliability, rather than performance.
Duncan Macdonald - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
However the test was in one respect unrealistic - the power feed was cut immediately. In the event of power failure to a PC the voltage rails drop over a period of several milliseconds which would allow the controller on a SSD to terminate operations more gracefully. This would probably not help with the serialization errors but should help with the corruption errors (including mapping table corruption). Note also in a PC the CPU will normally be halted (by loss of the POWER GOOD signal) before the power feed to the SSD drops below its tolerance so the interface should be idle before the point where the SSD shuts down.Lerianis - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
They also miss that a lot of people like myself do daily backups to an external or internal HDD (spinning drive) that is fault tolerant.Though, some people have been posting that drives with UEFI and GPT have a problem with restoration from backups using some programs.
The programs in question APPEAR to backup the data correctly but in reality? They don't so when you try to restore? You cannot and lose all your data.
Impulses - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Use a UPS?Lerianis - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
Best suggestion if you have an SSD is to only use it if you have a battery-backup.XmppTextingBloodsport - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link
Who does not protect their electronics with true sine wave double conversion UPS?!!?