JMicron's New 612 SSD Controller

Performance Analysis

Average performance across the drive as measured by HD-Tach is certainly very favourable for the Adata S596, with a burst speed of 255MB/s one of the highest we’ve recorded, and average read speeds across are the highest we’ve seen to date at just shy of 230MB/s. Average write speeds are strong too, and while unable to overhaul the top-ranking Corsair's 165MB/s, the S596’s average write of 152.7MB/s is still fairly good.

These theoretical translate well into our real world testing in FC-Test, with the 1GB MP3 file pattern written in just 7.2 seconds (138MB/s), copied in 5.7 seconds and read in just 3.9 seconds; all three results closely matching or bettering the OCZ Vertex. Using the larger 1.6GB ISO file pattern was less pleasing though and despite delivering a write time of 13.5 seconds (118MB/s), copy time of 14.7 seconds and read time of just 7 seconds (a new best) our copy times varied wildly and the S596 frequently produced copy results in excess of 40 seconds. As this drive is still pre-release we’ve contacted Adata for comment, but it’s still worth being wary.

Random write testing was the downfall of the original JMicron 602 drive controller so we looked closely at the Adata’s performance in IOmeter, both when dealing with random read and random write. Random read performance was, as to be expected from an SSD, very quick, although a random read speed of 20.5MB/s was is still notably slower than the 30MB/s+ the OCZ Vertex is capable of reaching. Random read latencies averaged just 0.57ms and maximum latency of 2.05ms – both excellent results that are more ten times faster than the best a hard disk drive can offer.

Although the Adata S596 still produced a mighty random write speed of 6.19MB/s – a far cry from the 602 controller’s random write speed of 0.03MB/s and a clear indicator that JMicron have made great strides in drive controller performance in the last twelve months, That said, the result is still notably slower than the Indilinx drive controller, as the Vertex achieved 9.63MB/sec.

Average write latencies are solid at just 1.89ms too – a little behind the Indilinx powered Vertex but still many times faster than a hard disk drive and more than worthy of a performance SSD. There’s an elephant in the room though and it’s the worryingly high maximum response time of 2616ms (that’s 2.6 seconds!) we’ve observed. While it’s obvious this is an isolated incidence - because the average write latencies and overall random write speed - are great, it’s still worth noting. Given the strength of the averages, in extended use it’s unlikely to cause any serious performance problems but we’ll be using the Adata S596 in a number of system here at bit-tech over the coming weeks and will report back our findings.

Rounding off the S596’s performance in the more real world tests of boot and Crysis load times the S596 clearly demonstrates the advantages of the excellent read performance we saw in the synthetic tests. A Windows Vista boot time of just 26 seconds is only a fraction of second behind the Indilinx powered OCZ Vertex and when loading Crysis the two drives were inseparable with a time of just 28 seconds – a comfortable 8 seconds faster than the popular Samsung Spinpoint F3 hard disk.