SSD Review – ADATA SP610 512GB Versus Corsair Force LX 512GB

Inside The ADATA Premier SP610 and Corsair Force LX

In fact, we are comfortable saying that these drives feature similar enclosures and Micron 20nm MLC NAND Flash with identical circuit boards, SMI controllers, Cache memory chips and even the firmware. So, at the end of the day the ADATA Premier Pro and Corsair Force LX are essentially the same internally, but when it comes to pricing and accessories the ADATA SP610 512GB is $10 less and comes with accessories that some might end up needing.

Internally both drives contain a half-height 2.5-inch SSD PCB with eight 20nm MLC NAND chips made by IMFT (Intel/Micron), a 512GB DDR3 cache chip by Nanya and of course the SMI SM2246EN SSD controller that we already talked about when introducing the two drives. We’ll get to the firmware on the next page, but both drives also have been confirmed by our friends at SMI as having the same exact firmware. SMI informed us that they do allow customization of their firmware, but it appears that neither ADATA nor Corsair opted to do so.

Both drives are pretty much identical, but one of things you’ll notice right off the bat is that the MLC Synchronous NAND on the ADATA drive is branded ADATA. Let’s take a closer look:

To go along with the SMI SM2246EN SSD controller we see that the ADATA Premier SP610 512GB SSD uses eight 64GB IMFT 60075103 20nm MLC NAND chips and a 256MB Nanya NT5CC256M16CP-D1 DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip that is used for caching.

The only difference on the Corsair Force LX is that they are using eight 64GB IMFT 60074157 20nm MLC NAND chips, but from what we are told they are identical Micron L85 products that were just packaged differently. The Corsair Force LX 256GB drive that we reviewed used dies labeled 60074309 and were 32GB Micron L85 chips.

Here is a look at the other side of the side of the PCB where there are four more MLC NAND chips and finally our first look at the SMI SSD Controller and the 256MB of Nanya DDR3 memory chip for caching operations. These 512GB drives have 256MB of cache versus the 128GB seen on the 256GB models.

The image above was included to show that the PCB markings/numberings are identical as both are labeled 61MSBZA5. The UL mark (E186014) is registered to Xin Qiang Electronics (Qingyuan) Co., Ltd. (also called Brian Power CO., Ltd), so it looks like Xin Qiang Electronics is making the PCB for the SMI SM2246EN SSD Controllers reference design SSD.

Let’s take a look at performance!