With the release of the SandForce 1200 based S599 ADATA is placing a superb piece of hardware onto the market. The results show potential and here and there even are flabbergasting. As such we can only conclude that SandForce 1200 based SSDs will show massive muscle throughout the board of tests. We did have one issue with with HDTune which does not seem to like the SSD at all, but perhaps that's solved with either a software update, or new firmware. Other then that it broke any and all records really.

First we need to point you to ATTO, we reached 280 MB/sec read performance and I have never ever seen that before. When we look at PCMark Vantage's HDD test then that's another scenario where the S599 shows incredible strength, not a little, much higher then anything we have ever seen. And we feel that PCMark Vantage's HDD test is probably the most realistic series of tests you can compare real world stressing a storage unit with..

The rest of the tests also where showing leading performance. So yes, the SF-1200 based S599  paints an entirely different picture opposed to the SF-1500 product we previewed a little while ago.

The performance is as advertised with read speeds up-to roughly 280 MB/sec and write performance at roughly 250+ MB/sec, depending on how you measure. It's good to see the Firmware support TRIM, so if you use Windows 7 that increases performance over a long time-span. We would prefer a Garbage Cleaning feature like the OCZ Agility and Vertex drives offer though, drives with such embedded technology optimize themselves once they are in IDLE, keeping advertised performance at 99% at all times.

It is fun to see where we are anno 2010, remember SSDs started to get popular in 2008 only. We finally see some more competition in the SSD arena. Intel, Indilinx, JMicron and now SandForce will all be fighting for that trophy and your hard earned money. The S599 will carry a price tag of roughly 375 EUR for the 100GB model making it more expensive than the competition like Indilinx, it's a grand product and we hope to see some good availability very soon. But whether or not you feel that extra performance is worth the extra money is totally up to you of course.

One fact remains, as expensive as an SSD still really is, it will get rid of one of the greatest bottlenecks in your system, your mechanical HDD. In return you'll receive extremely fast seek times, no more high latencies, fast file loading and writing and sure, after using several SSDs for the past year now can say that they are very reliable as well. Personally I love to have my Windows boot up in 30 seconds opposed to 55. The same with Photoshop which takes what 3 seconds to load up? The list goes on and on, linear to SSD development. The S599 is once again one step closer to the limitations of the SATA2 bus and kicks massive ass when it comes to helping out with better real-world performance on your PC. It won't be long before SATA 6G will be a mandatory requirement ... oh and that is soo good !

We hand out are hard to earn best hardware award to the ADATA S599, it really is an incredible piece of hardware and pushes SSD performance to a new level.

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