The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium
by Billy Tallis on October 9, 2017 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
When the Heavy test is run on a fresh drive, the ADATA XPG SX950 delivers a good average data rate that is a bit higher than the Crucial BX300 and close to the level of Samsung's SATA SSDs. But when the drive is full, the SX950 suffers greatly in the manner of the SU800 and the Crucial MX300, while the BX300 is minimally affected.
Both the average and 99th percentile latencies highlight how poorly the SX950 performs when the Heavy test is run on a full drive, but the latency when the test is run on a fresh drive is normal.
The average read and write latencies of the SX950 are both significantly higher when the Heavy test is run on a full drive, but the write latency is again far more strongly affected. For both reads and writes, the full-drive performance is better than the TLC-based ADATA SU800, but nowhere close to the standard set by the Crucial BX300.
The MLC-based SSDs almost all show very little degradation in 99th percentile read and write latencies when the drive is full. The exceptions are the ADATA SX950 and the DRAMless OCZ VX500. The 99th percentile read latency of the SX950 is higher when the drive is full, but still better than the planar TLC drives. The 99th percentile write latency on the other hand grows by more than an order of magnitude to almost 95ms.
The ADATA SX950 scores very well on energy usage when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive: it matches the DRAMless OCZ VX500 and comes close to the Crucial MX300, which uses a Marvell controller fabbed on a newer and lower-power process. The Crucial BX300 uses 14% more energy largely due to taking longer overall to complete the test. The situation is reversed when running the test on a full drive: the ADATA SX950 takes much longer to complete the test and is doing a lot of costly background garbage collection, though it still at least beats the planar TLC SSDs and ADATA's own TLC-based SU800.
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Cliff34 - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
It is almost for almost all your needs, budget or performance, better stick with Samsung's SSDs.Chaitanya - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Sadly Adata has diarrhea when it comes to releasing SSDs. They drop too many SSDs on market too fast.chrnochime - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
You!= everyone under the sun. And no not everyone wants to be stuck with a freakin TLC SSD, as much as you'd like to believe. How hard can that be to grasp? Wait rhetorical question LOLDr. Swag - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Is ADATA out of their minds? This drive performs on the budget end of the spectrum yet they're pricing it above the 850 pro?!?jardows2 - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Before I read the article, I thought I knew the conclusion - It will perform under Samsung products, and be priced a bit too high for the comparative performance. I guess I was highly optimistic about this drive! What is up with that price?Flunk - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
ADATA's pricing is truely perplexing. Maybe their market is "people who don't read SSD reviews", so they think they can write "premium" on the box and it justifies the price. Maybe they're pricing just so they can have it 50% off MSRP all the time. Regardless, I'd argue there isn't really such thing as a premium SATA SSD anymore because even budget NVMe drives throttle them.4x PCI-E 3.0 is 32Gbps, Fully 4 times the bandwidth of SATA 3. That's not a generational leap, it's a whole new ballgame, especially if you consider the reduction in overhead that comes with NVMe. SATA drives are now relegated to being upgrades for older desktops and notebooks, there is no "high-end" left.
ddriver - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
sata 3 is 6 gbits, IIRC 6 * 4 is 24Also, 4 times faster drive doesn't make a system 4 times faster. It is true that before SSDs, storage was pretty much the bottleneck, but if you look at real world benchmarks, the difference between a SATA and a NVME SSD is a few percents in 99% of the cases.
xeroshadow - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I can attest to this. I went from an Intel 330 series to NVMe Samsung 960 and barely noticed any difference except in some launch speeds of certain programs. I was disappointed.Samus - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
It's like CPU's. Programs just haven't caught up to their capability yet. Other than mass data transfer (between SSD's no less) you are likely to see any real-world performance boost from NVMe over SATA3. Decompressing is the only area I personally benefit from NVMe; it unRAR's files much faster than a SATA3 drive.But gaming, general usage, and even content creation I don't notice a difference.
saratoga4 - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
It's because while the transfer rate of high end NVMe drives is much higher, that really doesn't help you load a few dozen 10 MB files all that much faster. For lots of small to medium sized files, you need lower access latency, and NVME drives are little better than SATA, so until that improves the main place NVME will have an edge is copying files between NVME drives.