The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium
by Billy Tallis on October 9, 2017 8:00 AM ESTConclusion
At no point in our testing did the ADATA XPG SX950 convince us that it deserves to be regarded as a high-end SATA SSD, nor did it provide any evidence that the high-end SATA segment is still relevant. Under the right conditions, the SX950 can perform as fast as any other SATA SSD, but those are all the same tests where a low-end SATA SSD also performs fine.
Without the performance headroom that PCIe SSDs enjoy, a premium SATA SSD needs to distinguish itself by offering great performance in all conditions, under light or heavy workloads. The SX950 does the opposite. The aggressive SLC caching it uses to deliver high peak performance is a double-edged sword. When subjected to a large volume of writes, the SX950 accrues a large debt of cache flushing and garbage collection that have been deferred. Once the SLC cache fills up, the SX950's performance tanks. Both reads and writes suffer, though write performance much moreso. Worse, it takes the SX950 too long to finish cleaning up even when given the opportunity. The five minutes of idle time our test protocol reserves after filling the drive in preparation for some of the ATSB tests is clearly not long enough, and even during the ATSB Light test the SX950 can't finish catching up on its garbage collection.
The more recent Crucial BX300 uses the same Micron 32L 3D MLC and the same Silicon Motion SM2258 controller, but exhibits a completely different performance profile. Micron learned their lesson about taking SLC caching unnecessarily far on MLC drives with the Crucial MX200, and the BX300 has fairly small fixed-size SLC caches. This leads it to have lower performance than the SX950 under favorable conditions, but the BX300 holds up well under pressure.
The ADATA SX950 offers twice the warranty period of a typical budget SSD and a fairly high write endurance rating, but those are the only ways in which it can be regarded as a premium product. It doesn't even provide TCG Opal encryption support, a distinguishing feature that only a handful of SSD vendors implement for retail SSDs. Micron's first-generation 3D NAND is simply too slow to compete against Samsung's 3D NAND, and the SM2258 is a low-cost/low-power SSD controller that is ill-suited for competing against Marvell and Samsung controllers on performance. The result is a drive that not only falls far short of its lofty performance goals, but a drive that has unbalanced performance and makes poor use of the resources it has at hand.
| SATA SSD Price Comparison | |||
| 240-275GB | 480-525GB | 960-1050GB | |
| ADATA XPG SX950 | $135.22 (56¢/GB) | $269.99 (50¢/GB) | |
| ADATA SU800 | $89.99 (35¢/GB) | $158.65 (31¢/GB) | $274.99 (27¢/GB) |
| Crucial BX300 | $89.99 (38¢/GB) | $149.99 (31¢/GB) | |
| Crucial MX300 | $92.99 (34¢/GB) | $149.99 (29¢/GB) | $279.99 (27¢/GB) |
| Intel SSD 545s | $99.99 (39¢/GB) | $179.99 (35¢/GB) | |
| Samsung 850 PRO | $128.98 (50¢/GB) | $223.32 (44¢/GB) | $447.87 (44¢/GB) |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $99.95 (40¢/GB) | $159.99 (32¢/GB) | $327.99 (33¢/GB) |
| SanDisk Ultra 3D | $99.99 (40¢/GB) | $164.99 (33¢/GB) | $284.99 (29¢/GB) |
| WD Blue 3D NAND | $98.39 (38¢/GB) | $164.65 (33¢/GB) | $299.99 (30¢/GB) |
On a budget SSD, the problems with the ADATA XPG SX950 would be mildly disappointing but reasonable. For light desktop use, the SX950's weaknesses wouldn't come into play. But given the premium pricing, the SX950's failings are unacceptable. ADATA can't beat Samsung's 850 PRO on price, let alone the Crucial BX300.
As the Crucial BX300 shows, most of this could be fixed with radically different firmware. But ADATA can't get anywhere by trying to compete directly against the BX300 and its unbelievably low pricing. Instead, ADATA should take the lessons learned from the SX950 and prepare to offer a more sensible drive when they can get their hands on Micron's second generation 3D NAND, which the Intel 545s suggests will be far faster and more able to match the Samsung 850 PRO, especially if used with Silicon Motion's newest SM2259 SATA controller. However, that would still leave ADATA competing in a very narrow segment of the SSD market, as almost all premium products are now using NVMe and focusing more on performance than endurance and warranty period.
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Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
Nanu-nanu, as you centaurians say.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
*beep-borp* I am an alien. I am superior. *borp-borp-beep*svan1971 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
I stopped reading after I don't identify as human. To much self loathing from a no doubt educated idiot.svan1971 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
LMAO Perfect...Samus - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Even if the SU950 was cheaper than the BX300, I'd still rather have the BX300. I've never had to send a drive in to Crucial for warranty. Ever. Intel and Crucial have a 0% defect rate in my workplaces.Samsung had a number of 840 EVO's go sour years ago that resulted in a number of drive being sent in and replaced with new drives with new firmwares. In 2014 an 840 Pro even went bad, although I realize that is quite an anomaly for Samsung. The 840 EVO's were well documented to have issues.
I've seen a number of ADATA SP500's fail, they just drop and stop detecting at POST. Before Barefoot 3, OCZ drives had all the typical issues Sandforce drives were notorious for having until the SF-2281 launched and firmware matured. Recent OCZ drives, even the ARC100 (the cheapest Barefoot drive) is reasonably reliable. One was mailed in a few months ago for warranty due to Windows detecting SMART errors. The drive didn't fail, and data was cloned to an advance replacement OCZ mailed out next-day. The OCZ warranty process was excellent, but that doesn't help a drive began to fail.
Two Mushkin Reactors suffered the same issue seemingly years apart, they would randomly not detect, give a BSOD, and so on. The data was cloned to replacement SSD's and the Mushkin drives were RMA'd (which was a complete pain in the ass compared to OCZ with a 2 week turnaround no less) and the drives were fleabayed.
Granted, even Intel isn't immune to problems. Fortunately I have no SSD535's out in the field. These drives are notorious for self destructing from write amplification wear, and even though a firmware was issues to fix it recently, most of those drives have already killed themselves, and if you have an OEM model like a Lenovo, you can't apply the firmware (and Lenovo - reflecting their typical "quality" support - hasn't issued a firmware update even a year after Intel made it available.)
Overall, my point is, why would anybody buy a drive from someone other than Intel, Micron/Crucial, or Samsung? It's just a ridiculous gamble and is unlikely to save you money. There are niche drives like the Reactor that is still the cheapest 1TB SSD, so there are exceptions, but what exactly is ADATA bringing to the table that Samsung isn't with the 750, Crucial isn't with the BX300, and Intel isn't with the 600p?
ddriver - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
You poor peasants and your precious money. One's social standing is measured by how much one has spent on hardware, not the actual value of the purchase, and of course, how much RGB LEDs it has.Silly ADATA, still haven't figured out how to justify the higher cost of ownership due to the lack of vertical integration. 9 letters - RGB LED FTW. Why is the industry sleeping, we have RGB LEDs on mobos, coolers, ram, mice, keyboards, but not on SSD? Or maybe they are saving that for the next quantum leap in technology that's gonna leave people dazzled.
What intel brings with the 600p is hard to topple, it sure ain't easy to make an NVME drive that lousy. I also like how certain fairly expressive enterprise intel ssd drives behave when they run out of write cycles. While other vendors drives remain read-only, giving you the possibility to retrieve or use the existing data at your leisure, intel had the ingenious idea that such drives should brick themselves on the next post cycle. Such a great and highly useful feature. Who wouldn't want that?
Reflex - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
@samus You poor peasant! You poor poor peasant!Golgatha777 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Anecdotal evidence to support your last paragraph. I have probably 20 or so Intel, Crucial, and Samsung drives (75%+ being Crucial drives) spread around laptops, desktops, and even a couple of game consoles. Not one failure in the bunch. I did have to flash one of my M500 drives due to a post error, but the issue was well documented and a fix was issued within a month of it being reported by Crucial. I do own a couple of Sandisk drives, but I did my research and they use Marvell controllers and Micron RAM, so I felt like those weren't a gamble.Golgatha777 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
That should be Sandisk RAM for the Sandisk drives (Ultra IIs), not Micron.leexgx - Monday, October 16, 2017 - link
but this is a MLC drive so probably outlast most other drives