Adata had a vibrant booth at Computex 2018 and showed off a number of its data center focused products. The breadth of the offerings was surprising with a number of SSD offerings in different form factors as well as NVDIMMs.
ADATA NVMe SSDs in U.2, PCIe AIC, and M.3
At the booth, ADATA showed off a number of its SSDs alongside a number of different partner platforms. The first example was a U.2 NVMe SSD called the ADATA SR2000. The ADATA SR2000 U.2 SSD starts at 2TB and tops out at 11TB. It was shown off in conjunction with a Wistron OpenPower system. IBM Power9 has been out for several months and we are starting to see supercomputer announcements with it, including the recent #1 US DoE Summit supercomputer.
The ADATA SR2000CP is a PCIe 3.0 add-in card with a twist. It uses a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface to provide up to 6GB/s reads, far faster than standard PCIe x4 NVMe SSDs. The capacities can hit 11TB as well.
STH first broke the news of the M.3 form factor SSDs about a year ago. This year the compact form factor included offerings from ADATA. The ADATA IM3P33EC M.3 SSD has power loss protection. We were told that due to the controller used, these SSDs can hit up to 2TB of capacity. The new M.3 SSDs were shown off in an AIC chassis.
Overall, these are interesting options from ADATA. We asked why they are called “Industrial” and were told that those were for data centers and not just high temperature/ long operating life installations.
ADATA SATA DOMs and USB DOMs
We also were able to see the latest ADATA SATA DOMs and USB DOMs at the company’s booth. The ADATA IUM3M comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities. These modules are common for applications such as for NAS vendors to provide their OS boot solution. By using a USB DOM, vendors can keep valuable platform SATA/ SAS ports free for other uses.
At STH, we use a lot of SATA DOMs. The ADATA ISMS331 is a SATA DOM line that can range from 8GB to 128GB of capacity. It also has features like a housing that many SATA DOMs lack in the marketplace and has hardware write protection options for embedded systems.
ADATA NVDIMM Solutions
One of the hot technologies of the latest cycle is NVDIMMs. At STH we first used NVDIMMs when they were in a paltry 4GB capacity.
ADATA showed off a 16GB DDR4 NV RDIMM. These modules use a capacitor for power loss protection and dump to SLC NAND. For NVDIMMs, SLC is still the prevalent technology because of its write speed characteristics.
Final Words
Overall, we sta a lot of interesting technology for the server space at the ADATA booth. It was great to see ADATA with several lines of innovative products that can be used in servers.
