The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium
by Billy Tallis on October 9, 2017 8:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
Our ADATA XPG SX950 didn't seem to ever make use of the slumber power state; it draws about 0.8W with or without power management enabled. This is a relatively high active idle power draw for a SATA SSD, and the lack of deeper idle is unacceptable for mobile use.
The bright side of not using any deep idle states is that the ADATA XPG SX950 doesn't take any time to wake up; the 16µs latency we measured is pretty much all on the host side. Phison's SATA drives also do very well on this metric, and the rest all need more than half a millisecond to wake up.
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meacupla - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
ADATA's pricing of their lower end is usually in line with the competition. Or, at least, the last drive I bought from them was.This one... not so much
KAlmquist - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
If the intention is for these drives to sell at well below MSRP, Adata is not getting off to a good start. Amazon and B&H Photo are both pricing the 480GB model $20 higher than the MSRP, and Newegg is not selling it at all. My guess is that something tipped the retailers off to the fact that there is not going to be a lot of demand for this product, so they either went for a high markup (to compensate for the cost of holding a low turnover item in stock), or in the case of Newegg, decided to pass on it entirely.I recently bought a Samsung 850 Pro, which proves that there is still at least one person who is (stupid? gullible? bat shit crazy?) enough to pay up for a premium SATA SSD. :-) With a premium SATA SSD, you are paying for:
1) Consistent performance. For example, in the Anandtech Storage Bench light test, the ADATA drive does well if the drive is empty, but performance plummets if the drive is full. The Samsung 850 Pro performs almost identically regardless of whether the drive is full or empty.
2) Reliability. I have no reason to believe the Adata drive is unreliable, but the Samsung 850 Pro has a 10 year warranty and, more important, a long track record in the field. So the 850 Pro wins this category as well.
IndianaKrom - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
A couple years ago when I picked up an 850 pro/1 TB, it was at the time the best SATA SSD. Today it is still the best SATA SSD, and it will probably always be. At this stage I would be surprised if anyone manages to extract any more performance out of SATA than what an 850 Pro can do._mb - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Where is the "Performance Consistency" test?I hope you guys haven't stopped doing that one as that test is the most interesting one and sets you guys apart from other reviewers which don't do that.
Billy Tallis - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
The performance consistency test will be reintroduced soon. Since it was the least relevant to real-world desktop usage and the most likely to kill drives, it's been the lowest priority to run on the new 2017 testbed. Now that I'm pretty much done running all my drives through the 2017 test suite, I'll start going back and running the new performance consistency test on them. Those results will probably start being included in the SSD reviews in November, and they'll be added to the Bench database as they're available.Maleorderbride - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I realize this is not on you Billy, but why is the Mushkin Enhanced Reactor series not part of the 2017 SSD bench? That series is one of only four that someone might actually purchase knowingly.xype - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
So, at which point will it become a waste of time to review SSDs? Unless such a review only takes 15 minutes, I’d assume there’s plenty of hardware where the conclusions is not a simple "Get a Samsung" >90% of the time — or am I being too optimistic?RaistlinZ - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Q: "So, at which point will it become a waste of time to review SSDs?"A: 2016
xype - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Yeah :-/jabber - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I don't care. The issue is that SATAIII is saturated and all we need now are reliable mainstream hum drum SSD drives for a cheap price. There is nothing else left to achieve on SATAIII. It's like RAM FFS it's all within a few % whether you spend $100 or $200. They get away with it by adding pointless crap like RGB. I bet by XMAS we'll see SATAIII SSD drives with built in RGB on the edges. Anything to cover up and distract from the fact they are no longer anything special and all the same for day to day purposes.