The ADATA Premier SP550 SSD Review: A Second Look At Silicon Motion's SM2256 Controller

Sequential Read Performance

The sequential read test requests 128kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, and the drive is filled before the test begins. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.

The sequential read speed of the SP550 places it in the second tier, but there's nothing to complain about.

Power consumption during sequential reads is not quite low enough for the SP550 to compete against the best MLC-based drives, but its efficiency is otherwise pretty good.

ADATA Premier SP550 120GBADATA Premier SP550 240GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBADATA XPG SX930 120GBADATA XPG SX930 240GBADATA XPG SX930 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 120GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX200 480GBCrucial BX200 960GBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 256GBCrucial MX200 512GBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBPlextor M6V 256GBSMI 2256 Samsung NAND 500GBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 120GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 1TBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBToshiba Q300 480GB

The SP550's sequential read performance saturates by the time queue depth reaches 4 and is close at QD2. This drive isn't quite the fastest to reach its limit, but it's still easy to get full performance from it. The only real flaw here is the relatively low QD1 performance.

Sequential Write Performance

The sequential write test writes 128kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, and the drive is filled before the test begins. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.

As with the random write performance, the sequential write performance is very low. At this point even a good mechanical hard drive would be much faster, though several other TLC drives and some smaller MLC drives also fall below that threshold.

Power consumption is almost halved relative to the Crucial BX200, but that's still not enough for the SP550's efficiency on this test to be considered good.

ADATA Premier SP550 120GBADATA Premier SP550 240GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBADATA XPG SX930 120GBADATA XPG SX930 240GBADATA XPG SX930 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 120GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX200 480GBCrucial BX200 960GBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 256GBCrucial MX200 512GBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBPlextor M6V 256GBSMI 2256 Samsung NAND 500GBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 120GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 1TBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBToshiba Q300 480GB

Performance and power consumption are slightly better at QD1 as the SP550 gets to burn through its SLC cache at the beginning of the test, but after that there's no scaling with queue depth.