Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

ADATA SX900 shows SandForce can still hold its own.

Introduction

With newer and faster SSDs coming to market, we should not forget those capable controllers of yesteryear. There are plenty of folks out there cranking out products based on controllers that were until very recently the king of the hill. Competition is great for the market, and newer product launches have driven down the cost of the older SandForce 2281 SATA 6Gb/sec controller. ADATA makes a product based on this controller, and it's high time we gave it a look:

The ADATA XPG SX900 launched mid last year, and was ADATA's first crack at the eXtended capacity variant of the SandForce firmware. This traded off some of the spare area in the interest of more capacity for the consumer.

Specifications:

  • Capacity: 64, 128, 256, 512GB
  • Sequential read:  550 MB/sec
  • Sequential write: 520 MB/sec
  • Random read IOPS (up to):  k-IOPS
  • Random write IOPS (up to):  85 k-IOPS
Packaging:

Fairly standard packaging. The back of the SSD contains a product key for Acronis True Image HD, which can be used to clone your existing OS directly over to the SX900. My favorite part of ADATA's packaging is the included 2.5" to 3.5" adapter plate, which intentionally offsets the SSD as to align the SATA power and data ports to the same relative position as found on a 3.5" HDD. Normally these holes are centered, which limits installation options in cases with SATA hot-swap backplanes.

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