ADATA XPG SX900 (128GB) Review: Maximizing SandForce Capacity
by Kristian Vättö on June 8, 2012 1:25 AM ESTFinal Words
If you've seen one SF-2281 drive with synchronous NAND, you've seen them all. From a performance perspective, the ADATA XPG SX900 is as fast as every other SF-2281 SSD with synchronous NAND. The only thing that separates ADATA from the competition is the fact that they have disabled RAISE and hence offer 8GB more capacity than other drives.
Since we are dealing with such similar drives, it all boils down to price. This is where ADATA appears to be making a mistake. With higher capacities than the competition, ADATA's advantage should be lower price per GB, but it's not. Instead, the SX900 series is either more expensive or equivalent to other SF-2281 drives.
The only scenario where I can see ADATA XPG SX900 being better than the rest is if you seriously need or want a SandForce drive with a tiny bit more capacity than the others. However, that's unlikely because if you know you need more than 120GB, then it's likely that 128GB won't suffice either. It's better to buy 180GB or 240GB straightaway so you won't have to deal with a constantly full drive.
In any other case, you will get a better dollar per GB ratio by going with another brand, and on other SF-2281 drives you also get support for RAISE (outside of the 60GB models). While RAISE may sound a bit useless, it's something you won't appreciate unless something goes bad. My feeling is that it's better to have it and not need it than to not have it and need it. It comes down to the importance you place on reliability and data integrity, and right now there's just not enough data to really let us know how non-RAISE SF-2281 will compare over the long haul. Ideally, RAISE would be something that the end-user could trigger on or off depending on one's workload and setup but apparently that is not possible, or at least no manufacturer has offered a tool for that.
At the end of the day the SX900's appeal is determined entirely by price. As noted in the introduction, keeping an eye on SSD prices for at least a few days before pulling the trigger is a good idea because prices fluctuate all the time. If price is a major factor, Crucial's m4 along with the asychronous NAND Mushkin Chronos and OCZ Agility 3 are generally the drives to beat. They may not be the fastest offerings, but unless you really need every last bit of performance, they're still substantially better than any HDD and nearly as good as other offerings.
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kevith - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
I'l second that, I had exactly the same experience.Proper good job, mate!
Whyaskwhy - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
My knowledge is very limited, can you show me how each SSD compares playing online games? I play Rift, SWTOR, World of Tanks,and will be playing GW2 when it comes out.JarredWalton - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
Generally speaking, SSDs only improve game and level load times, and even then the difference may not be that large. If you have a PC with 4GB RAM or more, SSDs are really about improving Windows performance and responsiveness as opposed to improving gaming performance.CeriseCogburn - Monday, June 11, 2012 - link
Buy a sata3 6.0 (no matter your board speed), and you'll be fine - your frame rate won't go up a lot in games, although it does rise substantially (10%-40%) in some like flight sim (lots of tiny files to be accessed) and a bit in all others...What's good about them is not waiting for drive swapping IN GAME - so they can make a difference in responsiveness, it will be noticeable.
If you are a benchmark freak make certain you buy a 120gig (or 128) not a 60gig (or 64) as the 60gigs bench poorly because of fewer ram chip channels, however windows 7 and all the general goodies and several (3) large games fit on a 60 or 64 just fine, but a 120/128 is barely 30 bucks more, so spend $100 and get a 120.
The samsung 830's are hot but costly, I prefer 2281 sandforce asynchronus as they have several brand choices at the lowest of prices with excellent speed.
If you have a single spindle drive non raid boot you won't be sorry at all. It appears on P45 chipsets and above, a triple raid boot zero stripe is required before equal performance responsiveness is met (on sata 2).
So there you are - use the egg to see speed and click the reviews tab there and sort by most helpful you will see actual purchasers being quite helpful and giving their tested stats.
jaydee - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
I don't know if it was really worth all the analysis on the pricing, as it fluctuates so much. At any given time, it seems that you can get a 120/128GB drive for ~$100-110, last week it was Samsung, this week it's Crucial, I've seen Plextor there too, and at least one SandForce drive seems to be there perpetually.Not that I'm complaining about the prices, its great for the consumers, but it places an impossible burden on a reviewer to evaluate the bang-for-buck, because it changes daily.
Mathieu Bourgie - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
Thank you for the review Kristian.On a related note, I'm curious as to what happened to the Plextor M3 Pro review?
You commented on May 14th, in the Corsair Performance Series Pro (256GB) Review article that the "review should be up next week at the latest." and yet here we are nearly a month later with a review of a different SSD.
Thanks,
Mathieu
Kristian Vättö - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
It's been ready for about a month now. Only pricing table and final words are missing, but those can't be done until just before publishing. I wanted to get this review out of the way because I've had the drive for months. I asked Anand to test an updated 120GB SF drive for comparisons (it's been a while since we reviewed a 120GB SF drive, that's why), which took a bit longer than I thought (Anand is a very, very busy man ;-)).I will finish the M3P review this weekend and it will hopefully be up next week, depending on Anand's schedule and what else we have for next week (we don't want to post five reviews at once and then have nothing for the rest of the week. It's problematic when there are NDAs because they must go live ASAP, whereas other articles can wait).
swx2 - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
Ah! I was looking for that review as well, but thanks for the explanation :)TwistedKestrel - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
I could have sworn that RAISE was disabled on the 120 GB Intel 520... and I thought I read that here, but I see no mention of it in Anandtech's review.Airkol - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
Reducing the over-provisioning and shutting RAISE off my give the consumer a few extra bytes of storage. But what it costs them is the life of the drive. The write amplification of the drive will increase since there is less area to manage wear leveling.
This could reduce the life of the drive by 50%-75% depending on what type of data is being written.