The ADATA Ultimate SU800 SSD Review (128GB, 256GB, 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on February 1, 2017 12:01 PM ESTFinal Words
Judged against other entry-level SATA SSD, the ADATA Ultimate SU800 does not offer many significant performance improvements from its use of Micron 3D TLC NAND. Even if Micron's 3D TLC were substantially faster than the planar TLC it is competing against, the capacity of 384Gb per die compared to 128Gb for the planar TLC means that the SU800 has to get by with far fewer NAND chips to stripe accesses across. This parallelism is very important to achieving high performance, but the smallest 128GB SU800 has only three NAND flash chips to work with.
As total NAND capacity per die has increased, the page and erase block sizes have increased also. This is likely a major contributor to garbage collection having a much larger performance impact on the SU800 and Crucial MX300 than earlier TLC drives. Silicon Motion's controller and firmware in the ADATA SU800 don't seem to have adjusted to this quite as well as Micron's firmware has for the Marvell controller in the Crucial MX300. Despite having more spare area due to offering less usable capacity from the same amount of NAND, the 512GB ADATA SU800 seldom outperforms the 525GB MX300.
With the Crucial MX300, Micron chose to offer capacities of 275GB and up, retiring the 128GB capacity class. They also chose not to sample us the 275GB MX300, likely because of its lower performance than the larger capacities. ADATA is emphasizing those smaller capacities with the SU800 and taking on the challenge of offering decent performance with less parallelism available.
For light workloads where SLC caching is highly effective, ADATA has succeeded in roughly matching the performance of the last generation of planar TLC budget SSDs. This has come at the apparent expense of performance on heavier workloads and when working with a full drive. The 512GB SU800 is the smallest capacity that performs well on our ATSB Heavy test, and at all capacities it is important to not let the SU800 fill up or operate without TRIM being used.
Back when most of the SSD market was still using MLC NAND, Silicon Motion established a reputation for offering one of the most power efficient platforms. This advantage has been reduced with the transition to TLC for mainstream drives, and with the SU800 it now seems to be completely gone. In terms of power consumption, the SU800 and every other budget and mainstream SSD are still overshadowed by the Crucial MX300's remarkable efficiency.
| 120-128GB | 240-275GB | 480-525GB | 960-1050GB | |
| ADATA SU800 | $52.99 (41¢/GB) | $81.99 (32¢/GB) | $147.07 (29¢/GB) | $269.99 (26¢/GB) |
| ADATA SP550 | $48.99 (41¢/GB) | $71.97 (30¢/GB) | $134.99 (28¢/GB) | $299.99 (31¢/GB) |
| PNY CS1311 | $49.99 (42¢/GB) | $59.99 (25¢/GB) | $129.99 (27¢/GB) | $269.99 (28¢/GB) |
| Samsung 750 EVO | $85.98 (72¢/GB) | $129.95 (52¢/GB) | $139.99 (28¢/GB) | |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $98.00 (39¢/GB) | $169.99 (34¢/GB) | $319.99 (32¢/GB) | |
| Crucial MX300 | $89.99 (33¢/GB) | $146.42 (28¢/GB) | $259.99 (25¢/GB) |
The ADATA SU800 is priced as an entry-level SSD, but the entire market is heavily affected by an ongoing NAND shortage. There are a few older planar TLC SSDs that are still able to beat the SU800's prices by a few dollars, when they're in stock. But the bigger problem for the SU800 is that ADATA can't reliably beat Micron's pricing on the Crucial MX300. When taking into account the slightly higher usable capacity and better performance and efficiency, the MX300 is a better deal than the equivalent SU800.
That leaves the 128GB SU800 as the only member of the lineup that might make sense to buy at the moment. It has far fewer competitors as 120GB SSDs are disappearing from the market. With the caveat that the 128GB SU800 should only be used in scenarios where it is definitely larger than necessary and will be presented with light workloads, the SU800 is a fine alternative and a reasonable purchase if it's roughly tied for being the cheapest SSD in that capacity class.
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Arbie - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - link
@eek2121: Anandtech has changed most of its drive tests in the past two years, but it's easy to compare the Mushkin Reactor to this Adata in IOMeter 4KB random reads & writes. In these, the Mushkin is 50% faster. So please provide your basis for saying it's "drastically slower". While it may "soon disappear", that's been true for the past 18 months and it's still there, at $240. And FYI "clickbait" is the swathe of pandering pix labeled "From the Web". Anandtech provides these to raise its status as a on-line source of repute and save us the trouble of looking for garbage on our own.Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - link
The Mushkin Reactor was one of the last drives tested with our 2013 test suite. Even though we used IOmeter back then, the test protocol was different. The 4kB random access numbers reported in that review were for QD3 using an 8GB test file, while our current 2015 test suite uses a 16GB file for random writes and the whole drive for random reads, and the score reported is the average of QD1, QD2, and QD4 performance. If the numbers were directly comparable, we'd be directly comparing them.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 9, 2017 - link
"drastically"A few thousand IOPS is "drastically" now eh? For this market, they would never notice the difference.
eek2121 - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
What is so click-baity about this? It's a review. Did you bother reading it? They came to the same conclusion you did. It's not that great. The Mushkin Reactor has been discontinued, why would they include it?lopri - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - link
That drive is not faster than what is benched. MLC does not automatically make a good SSD.Having said that, I do sometimes think AT neglect hardware of the past in their review, which is regrettable. Consumers not only compare current products but also upgrade their old gears, and they want to see if it is a worthy undertaking.
fanofanand - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
Some might say I am being greedy or unrealistic, but I think that when SSD's hit 1TB for under $100, then we will finally be able to put the axe in mechanical hard drives with the exception of the 10+ TB drives for archiving or media libraries. If I could pick up a 2TB for under $200 I would buy it today. We are so close, yet so far.Great_Scott - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
1TB drives were around $200 6 months ago.Most people seem to have around 3TB of data, not including any bloated Steam libraries, $600 over the course of a year (late 2015 to late 2016) seems reasonable, it's what I did.
Of course, the recent price increase probably blindsided most people, but if it was made a priority many enthusiasts don't need to be using spinning rust pretty much regardless of non-archive non-media (bulk) data.
But I keep seeing posts like yours. Does everyone want to only use 1 SSD in thier PC for some reason?
Laststop311 - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
You have to not include blu ray disc image libraries either. I have a 6 bay NAS with 6x 4TB in raid 5 giving me 20TB of space 10TB of that is gone from 200 blu ray disc images and another 5TB from FLAC audio. When I have to upgrade all my disc images to 4k blu ray disc images they double in size + i will have more fo them. I will have to rebuild my nas with 6x 12TB drives at that point. So plenty of enthusiasts will still need spinning rust. For my next PC tho I plan on using a 128-256GB optane drive for the OS and most used productivity apps and VLC media player and chrome and my favorite couple games. A 1TB nvme drive for the majority of my most played games and 2x 2TB SATA 3 2.5" SSD's that my torrents will download onto and seed for awhile before being moved to the NAS or installed on a faster drive or deleted.The_Assimilator - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - link
"Does everyone want to only use 1 SSD in thier PC for some reason?"Why use a whole bunch of drives if you can only use 1? Saves on cable clutter, physical space (important for the rise in SFF systems) and just makes things simpler overall. Personally I can't wait for 4TB SSDs to become mainstream in price so that I can replace my mechanical disk.
JimmiG - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - link
I have about 1.2 TB of SSD storage spread over 240 GB, 480 GB and 500 GB SSD's, bought in the last couple of years. 1.2 TB in a single drive would be much more convenient since you wouldn't have to juggle your game installations and other files to keep the amount of free space on each SSD reasonable and balanced.After I got a NAS, I only have an old 1 TB HDD (in addition to the SSDs) in my PC for general data storage and less frequently used applications and games. I don't think "spinning rust" is going anywhere, but I think the smaller capacities (<3TB) are going away. People want them for bulk storage in NAS devices or as external USB drives.