The ADATA XPG GAMMIX S10 (512GB) SSD Review: Entry-Level NVMe With Style
by Billy Tallis on October 25, 2017 8:30 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.
The ADATA XPG GAMMIX S10 doesn't handle the Heavy test much better than the Intel 600p did. Both deliver a lower average data rate than many SATA SSDs.
Both the average and 99th percentile latency scores of the GAMMIX S10 on the Heavy test are a clear improvement over the Intel 600p, but both drives are behind mainstream SATA drives and even further behind the TLC NVMe competition.
The average read latency of the GAMMIX S10 is slightly better than most SATA SSDs, but substantially higher than the typical NVMe SSD. The average write latency is more of a problem, as it is generally higher than mainstream SATA SSDs.
The 99th percentile read latency of the GAMMIX S10 is good, beating some MLC-based NVMe SSDs and any SATA SSD. The 99th percentile write latency is only slightly better than the Intel 600p, and both have a serious problem with controlling write latency.
The power consumption of the GAMMIX S10 on the Heavy test is typical for most NVMe SSDs. Good SATA SSDs use much less energy over the course of the test, but few current NVMe SSDs can match the efficiency of SATA, and the GAMMIX S10 isn't one of them.
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rrinker - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
For some reason I thought the black insert was plastic, but it actually doesn't say either way. If plastic, well... You pretty much said what I was skirting around, it's all cosmetic like so many of the weird and funky heat sinks/heat spreaders you see on "enthusiast" gear. There to look cool, doesn't actually do much of anything, either because it's not really needed, the device with the heat sink doesn't actually get all that hot, or it's no more effective than a plain old simple heatsink.Wwhat - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
I am absolutely perplexed that anandtech doesn't specify the material of that insert. I mean that is so goddamn relevant.And I'm actually wondering what adata's comment on that insert would be. They should have asked them.
As for needed, all tests have shown a good heatsink on the M2 SSD's does indeed do a world of good. And tests have also shown that half the companies in the world that supply such, either bundled or third party, can't figure out such a simple thing as a piece of aluminium on a freaking small rectangle. I mean how complex is it? But again it's been shown that if you put a good one on it it's always noticeably beneficial.
jjj - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Don't understand how one imagines a product with that seq read perf.trparky - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
I went to go look at what you were talking about and my first reaction when I saw the graphs was "Ouch! WTF!". It barely matches the performance of a SATA SSD, putting it on NVMe is just a waste.r3loaded - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
If your product is going to get curbstomped in performance by the 960 Evo, at least try to price it at a significant discount vs the 960 Evo.ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
It is very hard to undersell samsung, they make the memory, they make the controller, they make the pcb. Vertical integration.Now imagine that you have to buy each of those components from someone else, pay profit margins on the components, then put work into making a product out of it, and sell that product with a profit margin for yourself.
It is a pointless endeavor. In a better world, they won't even bother to compete with a vertically integrated company like samsung. But in the world as it is, there are plenty of idiots who will buy this, one way or the other, either for the gimmicky but nice looking heatsink, or it will get it shoved down their throats by an OEM who has a deal with the manufacturer to bundle the product.
The negative aspect of this is that after so many years of domination, samsung will significantly cut on the purchase value of their products, because it still has tremendous lead and could let some of it melt in order to materialize as profits. Upcoming SSDs from samsung, even if a tad faster, will be disappointing compared to what we used to get in the past. Get ready for a slump of TLC and QLC, endurance and warranty period cuts.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
People aren't idiots. They are just uninformed. There is a big difference. For my uninformed friends who either can't or don't want to do the research, my recommendation is always "just buy Samsung and don't worry about it". Or if they want reasonably priced but larger storage with "OK" performance then it's "just buy Crucial and don't worry about it.If you know specifically what you are looking for and know what trade offs you are willing to make there are other choices that fit certain niches. But even knowing what I wanted/needed I ended up with a 512 GB 960 EVO and a 750 GB MX300 (got on prime day last year for $139 :)).
ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
"People aren't idiots. They are just uninformed."Tomayto, tomahto... If you make a purchase uninformed, that's idiocy right there.
IMO everyone is an idiot, including me. It is not a matter of idiots or non-idiots, at this stage of evolution we are all idiots, it's just that some are more idiotic than others. And the first step to overcoming idiocy is to acknowledge it :) The gradation of idiocy is acknowledgement of it, ignorance of it, mistaking it for something else and finally taking pride in it.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
For sata the WD/Sandisk 3D SSD's seems a like a better option than the Crucials.KAlmquist - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
A vertically integrated company like Samsung still wants to make a profit on its investments into R&D, so the fact that all of the R&D is done by one company doesn't directly help costs. It does remove some of the costs associated with developing and maintaining relationships between companies. For example, Silicon Motion has to market its products to SDD manufacturers, which is an overhead that Samsung's controller development group doesn't have. Another possible cost savings for Samsung is that it knows it's controllers will never be used with anything other than Samsung flash, so it doesn't have to develop a controller that is compatible with multiple brands of flash.