The ADATA Ultimate SU800 SSD Review (128GB, 256GB, 512GB)

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The average data rates delivered by the ADATA SU800 are slower than most of its competition, but it is improved over the earlier engineering sample from Silicon Motion and the Intel 540s that paired the SM2258 controller with SK Hynix 16nm TLC.

Latency is a weak point for the SU800, with average service times that are higher than almost all of its competition. The 128GB SU800 suffers the most, with an average over 21ms.

Aside from the smallest 128GB capacity, the SU800 doesn't have too many operations that take more than 100ms to complete, but at the 10ms threshold all three capacities rank poorly against the competition.

With so much time spent bogged down by garbage collection, it is no surprise that the smaller capacities of the SU800 use somewhat more power than most of the competition. The 512GB SU800 compares favorably against the planar TLC competition, but doesn't come close to the efficiency of the Crucial MX300.