JMicron's New 612 SSD Controller

Final Thoughts

While we’re not quite able to give the JMicron 612 a fully clean bill of health at this pre-release stage, there are nevertheless a lot of positives to take from our first experience with JMicron’s new drive controller in the Adata S596.

Firstly, sequential speeds, both when reading and writing, are excellent and well on par with the competition from Indilinx, Samsung and Intel. Real world performance is also very strong, all but matching the established leading drives when it comes to booting an operating system or loading Crysis.

Following the stuttering issues with the original 602 JMicron controller the 612’s random write performance was always going to be where JMicron’s controller would be judged and while it’s undoubtedly an enormous improvement, it’s not perfect. An average random write speed of just over 6MB/s is great and an average write latency of less than 2ms should put all our concerns to rest, but the worryingly high maximum write latency of 2616ms remains a concern. We’re hoping this will be corrected before the first drives hit stores in January, but judging by the average write latency, even now it won’t cause any noticeable problems – we’ll report back then having used the Adata S596 day to day for an extended period.


While the Adata S596 and its JMicron 612 can be hailed a success in terms of putting the spectre of the 602 to rest, we can’t help but be a little disappointed though. The first review samples of Indilinx powered SSDs started appearing in February 2009, yet having had ten months of R&D JMicron has only produced a drive that roughly matches up to those based on the Indilinx controller, with the S596 failing to comprehensively show any aspect of performance where it can convincingly overhaul drives like the OCZ Vertex or Crucial M225.

Of course, this won’t be a problem if JMicron and it’s drive partners can hit the right price tag – at present you can expect to pay £400+ for a 128GB OCZ Vertex and less than £300 for a Crucial M225 (a baffling price gap considering they are physically identical) and if drives such as the S596 can convincingly undercut those prices there’s sure to be a market for these drives.

However, as the most expensive component in an SSD is the NAND flash, we can’t see JMicron based drives hitting those low, low prices any time soon. By our calculations the non-NAND components in a standard SSD (such as the cache, drive controller, PCB and casing) cost less than £30 to manufacture, leaving ninety per cent of the price tag down to the precious NAND modules. Unless prices for NAND drop across the board, a world of £1/GB SSDs, the point at which we predict mass adoption, remains a dream.


Pricing aside, there’s also plenty of information still to come from drive partners surrounding the JMicron 612 drive controller. Will it support TRIM in Windows 7? Will it include automatic performance recovery (aka garbage collection)? And most importantly of all, will there be user upgradeable firmware, a feature infamously lacking from all drives based on Samsung’s ARM processor drive controller such as the Corsair P256 and OCZ Summit series. Adata haven’t been able to answer these questions yet and we’ll likely have to wait until the first retail samples hit stores.

The issue here we feel is that JMicron and much of the SSD industry is playing catch-up with Indilinx right now. Its drives have been consistently supported by firmware updates (the lack of which is an unbelievable oversight from competitors considering the immature nature of the technology), offer superb performance right across the board from sequential read and write to random write to our real world tests, and have been the first to market with features like TRIM support. Competitors, even big players such as Intel, are now pushing to offer a similar array of features for their own SSDs and JMicron will need to match Indilinx on these fronts if the 612 controller and the drives based around it are to be a success.

Addendum 10th December 2009: We've just had an email confirmation from Adata about a few things:

• Does the S596 have TRIM in the firmware provided?
  [The S596] will have new firmware provided by January which will support TRIM functions
  
• Does the S596 have automatic performance maintenance/garbage collection?
  Yes
  
• Is it Firmware updateable and will A-DATA be offering regular Firmware updates?
  Yes, we will offer regular firmware updates as always.