Memory manufacturer A-DATA has just announced its 300 Plus series of solid-state drives which according to the company are equipped with a new controller design to increase data-reading rates by as much as 40 percent and write rates by 60 percent compared to standard SSDs. This should amount to speeds of 250MB/s and 160MB/s, respectively.


By comparison, the consumer oriented Intel X-25M SSD has similar read speeds but can only write at 70MB/s, whereas the enterprise-grade X25-E Extreme variant ups the latter spec to 170 MB/s and will set you back around $420 for 32GB of storage. The new 2.5-inch SATA II drives also boast 64MB of built-in mobile SDRAM that acts as a cache buffer to enable faster access to frequently used applications. They are intended as drop-in updates for notebooks and will ship in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities for a yet to be announced price.