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

Performance Consistency

Starting things off, our performance consistency test explores the extent to which a drive can reliably sustain performance during a long-duration random write test. Specifications for consumer drives typically list peak performance numbers only attainable in ideal conditions. The performance in a worst-case scenario can be drastically different as over the course of a long test drives can run out of spare area, have to start performing garbage collection, and sometimes even reach power or thermal limits.

In addition to an overall decline in performance, a long test can show patterns in how performance varies on shorter timescales. Some drives will exhibit very little variance in performance from second to second, while others will show massive drops in performance during each garbage collection cycle but otherwise maintain good performance, and others show constantly wide variance. If a drive periodically slows to hard drive levels of performance, it may feel slow to use even if its overall average performance is very high.

To maximally stress the drive's controller and force it to perform garbage collection and wear leveling, this test conducts 4kB random writes with a queue depth of 32. The drive is filled before the start of the test, and the test duration is one hour. Any spare area will be exhausted early in the test and by the end of the hour even the largest drives with the most overprovisioning will have reached a steady state. We use the last 400 seconds of the test to score the drive both on steady-state average writes per second and on its performance divided by the standard deviation.

For its capacity, the SP550 maintains a higher average random write speed than most low-end drives and even manages to beat some MLC drives, including a narrow advantage over the SM2246EN-based Crucial BX100. This is significant as the only major change between the SM2246EN and the SM2256 was the addition of LDPC error correction, so the firmware on the SP550 is achieving better performance with slower flash on a controller that is basically the same where this benchmark is concerned.

The SM2256 is a budget-oriented controller based around a single-core processor. This makes it extremely difficult to completely eliminate pauses or periods of greatly reduced performance during garbage collection. The SP550 is hardly alone in this, and its consistency scores are typical for its market segment.

Default	ADATA Premier SP550 120GBADATA Premier SP550 240GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBOCZ ARC 100 240GBPlextor M6V 256GBSamsung 850 EVO 120GBSamsung 850 EVO 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 256GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 240GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBToshiba Q300 480GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 500GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB
25% Over-Provisioning	ADATA Premier SP550 120GBADATA Premier SP550 240GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 120GBToshiba Q300 480GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB

Upon reaching steady state, the SP550 shows a clear baseline of performance plus some random variation that is capped at the average IOPS attained before the spare area was exhausted. At the higher capacities a much higher share of the writes are completed at full speed and the distribution becomes mostly bimodal.

Default	ADATA Premier SP550 120GBADATA Premier SP550 240GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBOCZ ARC 100 240GBPlextor M6V 256GBSamsung 850 EVO 120GBSamsung 850 EVO 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 256GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 240GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBToshiba Q300 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 500GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB
25% Over-Provisioning	ADATA Premier SP550 120GBADATA Premier SP550 240GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 120GBToshiba Q300 480GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB

Looking more closely at the steady state, we can see that the garbage collection cycles take longer on the higher capacity drives, though not as long as on the Toshiba Q300. Neither the baseline performance nor the peak performance is strongly dependent on capacity.