The ADATA XPG SX8200 & GAMMIX S11 NVMe SSD Review: High Performance At All Sizes
by Billy Tallis on July 25, 2018 11:00 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 running the Heavy test on freshly-erased drives, the average data rates from the ADATA SX8200 and GAMMIX S11 are excellent, and a huge improvement over their predecessors. Performance varies relatively little with capacity, with the 480GB drives delivering essentially the same speeds as the 1TB HP EX920, and the 240GB SX8200 is only slower by about 12%. The catch is that these drives using the SM2262 controller lose most of their performance advantage when the test is run on a full drive.
The average latencies from the latest ADATA drives are great when the test is run on an empty drive, but are on par with the competition when the drives are full. The 99th percentile latencies for the full-drive test runs are generally worse than the current-generation competition.
The average write latencies of the SX8200 and GAMMIX S11 highlight what seems to be the most significant weakness of this drive architecture, with full-drive performance drops that are far larger than is typical for high-end SSDs. The average read latencies also show a large performance drop, but the SX8200 and GAMMIX S11 started out with a decent lead in the empty drive test runs so this doesn't cause much trouble.
When looking at 99th percentile latency, both read and write operations suffer remarkably on the SM2262 drives when the test is run on a full drive. The 1TB HP EX920 is least affected, but the smaller ADATA drives have a real problem as their full-drive latency can be worse than mainstream SATA drives.
Only the smallest SX8200 stands out in the energy usage results. The larger models have fairly typical power efficiency for both the empty and full drive test runs, but the 240GB SX8200 loses a lot of performance when full and burns a lot more energy on background garbage collection.
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Pewzor - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
FuzeDrive (aka Virtual SSD) is used by Dell EMC data center, people saying you lose FuzeDrive you lose everything is just full of it. FuzeDrive is just Virtual SSD (by Enmotus) rebranded for AMD use.It works like Intel Rapid Storage except VSSD is data center proven.
There's a very little chance for total catastrophic failure to happen, which could happen to IRST as well.
You will lose your data when multiple drives fail at the same time, which is true even for raid 1 and raid 5.
VSSD/FuzeDrive when it pushes data across different devices it creates a mirror in (duplicates in shadow file), and the duplicates are not purged until after the data is verified to complete copying to the new destination drive.
Only time this happens is when file is copied the destination drive fails the instant the copy is verified then the source device fails and breaks the shadow image.
Technically even a 3 drive raid 5 array could fail catastrophically if all 3 drives failed.
eddieobscurant - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link
I think the drives deserved an award.Samus - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link
Double sided :(Would be good for a notebook considering the power profile and price. The 980 EVO is just dangerous in a mobile device so I've been sticking to the WD Black, which is still pretty expensive.
wolve - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link
FYI this SSD is on sale for $100 on Rakuten. Got it a few weeks ago when they had a similar deal.https://www.rakuten.com/shop/adata/product/ASX8200...
SanX - Saturday, July 28, 2018 - link
This drive was completely destroyed by the Destroyer still the author and the crowd sing the Dithyrambs to it.gglaw - Saturday, August 11, 2018 - link
the vast majority of home users could not even emulate the Destroyer tests if they tried and it has no bearing on the actual user experience. It is there mostly for academic purposes - did you even read the details of what the Destroyer test runs? For even an advanced home techie, this drive's price/performance is most likely the best that currently exists, especially when it goes on sale for $95 for the ~500GB model. That's not much higher than a budget SATA drive for identical performance to a 970 EVO or WD Black for home use. It's been on sale for $95-$100 3X now that I'm aware of, not only should the author give it a positive review, for the segment it addresses I feel it should be even given Editor's Choice. And yes I have 2 of these so not just making up opinions based on reading tests that I don't understand. There is absolutely no visible difference between this, the 960 EVO and 970 EVO which I have all running in the same LAN room.Wolfclaw - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
Based on review, I purchased the 240GB SX8200 for new Ryzen build, it came yesterday, now just waiting for the motherboard ... running out of patience :(Wolfclaw - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
OK, got one for my x470 and it is fast, would I notice the difference to say a Samsung, I doubt it. 4 seconds form boot to W10 desktop, I have a large Outlook data footprint and it opens and is ready a lot quicker than my old SSD, Visual Studio is extremely responsive with it.a_pete - Friday, August 31, 2018 - link
I think there's an issue in the power consumption information for the Optane 800p.It's being listed here (and on other charts) as using 0.8W while active, but on the review page it was actually using 3.5W active. This is messing up all the Power efficiency charts.
Thanks!