A-DATA S592 128GB SSD Review

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


As expected, the boot time of this drive is lower than the others we have tested. Is this unexpected? Not in the least, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise for you either. Older firmware which translates to lower performance should equal lowered real world tests…especially when this drive doesn’t have the Samsung’s 128MB of cache to hide its failings.

Adobe CS3 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible.


The Adobe test seems to agree that the firmware differences really are that important. As we have said in the past, the 1-2 combination of synthetic and real world tests really help paint one heck of a clear picture. Unfortunately, for this drive (and A-Data) this is not a pretty picture, it may not be at the level of 4Chan bad but it is not exactly pretty either.