The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution
by Billy Tallis on December 18, 2019 12:30 PM ESTConclusion
The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro offers decent performance for an entry-level NVMe SSD. Its performance profile is a bit atypical: peak performance is definitely lower than most of its competitors (especially drives using Silicon Motion controllers), but in most cases the SX6000 Pro handles our harder tests better than expected. This is surprising because the SX6000 Pro takes the approach of using the largest SLC cache sizes possible, which is usually a way to optimize for peak performance.
The SX6000 Pro is still clearly an entry-level NVMe SSD and not a high-end drive, so it does have its performance pitfalls. But they're not as bad or as easy to run into as most other drives in this product segment. The SX6000 Pro slows down a ton if you keep writing to it after the SLC cache fills up, but given enough idle time it will clean things up and go on to provide better performance with a full drive than any of its competitors. It's ill-suited to workloads like video editing, but for more typical desktop usage it reliably outperforms SATA SSDs by a wide margin.
So Realtek's second-generation NVMe controller has overcome the performance limitations of their first attempt, and is now ready to grab some market share as the mainstream consumer storage market moves on from SATA.
Realtek is however definitely still new to the storage game, and their controller platform still has some rough edges. The power management situation for their RTS5763DL controller is seriously disappointing. We usually see DRAMless SSDs turning in some of the lowest power consumption numbers thanks to the reduced part count, and where they have reasonable performance that translates to excellent efficiency scores. The SX6000 Pro never gets close to having great efficiency; at best it manages to be about average. Under load, it often ends up delivering less than half the performance per Watt of other DRAMless NVMe SSDs that have similar overall performance.
The SX6000 Pro also fails to provide idle power management suitable for mobile use. It does have some ability to reduce power at idle so it isn't in danger of overheating from typical interactive workloads, but for a laptop its competitors are 30x better in their deepest idle state. On the bright side, the power management situation for this Realtek controller is less broken than a lot of the early NVMe controllers we saw from other vendors, so they have less to fix with their next generation.
Overall, if it weren't for the power consumption, the SX6000 Pro would be a fairly strong competitor within this low-end NVMe segment. But this is also the least-compelling product segment of the overall SSD market: these drives are still usually more expensive than mainstream SATA SSDs, and jumping up to a true high-end NVMe drive doesn't add much to the price tag.
| 240-256GB | 480-512GB | 1TB | |
| ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro | $39.99 (16¢/GB) |
$77.88 (15¢/GB) |
$119.99 (12¢/GB) |
| ADATA XPG GAMMIX S5 | $39.99 (16¢/GB) |
$109.99 (11¢/GB) |
|
| Mushkin Helix-L | $36.99 (15¢/GB) |
$56.99 (11¢/GB) |
$104.99 (10¢/GB) |
| HP EX900 | $36.99 (15¢/GB) |
$56.99 (11¢/GB) |
$120.17 (12¢/GB) |
| Kingston A2000 | $39.99 (16¢/GB) |
$59.99 (12¢/GB) |
$159.00 (16¢/GB) |
| Crucial P1 | $67.57 (14¢/GB) |
$99.99 (10¢/GB) |
|
| Intel 660p | $64.99 (13¢/GB) |
$108.99 (11¢/GB) |
|
| Intel 665p | $124.99 (12¢/GB) |
||
| WD Blue SN500 | $43.99 (18¢/GB) |
$54.99 (11¢/GB) |
|
| WD Blue SN550 | $69.99 (28¢/GB) |
$89.99 (18¢/GB) |
|
| ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro | $49.99 (20¢/GB) |
$69.99 (14¢/GB) |
$147.99 (14¢/GB) |
| HP EX950 | $71.99 (14¢/GB) |
$126.99 (12¢/GB) |
|
| Mushkin Pilot-E | $67.99 (14¢/GB) |
$129.99 (13¢/GB) |
|
| Samsung 970 EVO Plus | $69.99 (28¢/GB) |
$99.99 (20¢/GB) |
$197.48 (20¢/GB) |
| Silicon Power P34A80 | $41.99 (16¢/GB) |
$62.99 (12¢/GB) |
$114.99 (11¢/GB) |
| WD Black SN750 | $62.99 (25¢/GB) |
$79.99 (16¢/GB) |
$196.00 (20¢/GB) |
The low-end NVMe market is currently plagued by inconsistent availability and pricing, so it's hard to get a clear picture of how the products rate against each other in terms of overall value. Most of these drives are relatively low-volume products compared to the high-end models from the same brands, and the Intel and WD drives are currently transitioning between generations. But in spite of all of that, the ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro and the related GAMMIX S5 (with a heatsink) collectively offer pricing in the right ballpark for this segment, but it's undercut at every capacity by drives like the Mushkin Helix-L. The SX6000 Pro is also facing pressure from above in the form of cheap Phison E12 drives, with the Silicon Power P34A80 currently offering some of the lowest prices. That provides far better performance and power efficiency for little or no added cost.
The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro shows that Realtek is making a lot of progress with their SSD controllers, but they aren't quite ready to steal a lot of market share from Silicon Motion and Phison as of yet. They've almost caught up, but they will need to offer SSD controller platforms with compelling advantages in order to entice drive vendors away from their existing partnerships.
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Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
My mindset is that your complaint isn't specific to the SX6000P; it's true of the entire category of "low-end NVMe" drives, so I don't want to single out the SX6000P for suffering from the same problem that all of its closest competitors also suffer from. It's halfway-decent at what it's trying to be, but it's trying to compete in a niche that barely exists in the first place.At least for the retail SSD market. The most popular retail NVMe SSDs are all high-end drives, so they get economies of scale that the low-end models don't, and that's why E12 and SM2262 drives can be priced so close to low-end NVMe. But in the OEM market, low-end NVMe drives do have a more compelling value proposition, and that's where the controller vendors make the real money.
That in turn influences what kind of drive designs the SSD vendors have on hand to readily convert into a retail product. The best example of this is the WD Blue SN500/SN550 series, which existed as an OEM product for a year before it came to retail. There's also Toshiba's BG series, which has been through four generations and they only bothered to do a retail release of one of them.
Great_Scott - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
The SSD market is and has been monstrously compressed.The difference between performance tiers for SATA is frequently $10/tier. (excepting the occasional Samsung drive.)
I don't see that anything is substantially different for NVMe. This is a good, maybe great, budget drive. The problem being that you can spend $10 for a far better one.
At some point in the future where price isn't entirely dictated by Flash BoM this might change, but for now it only makes sense to get the best drive in a category since they all cost about the same.
Freeb!rd - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
My thoughts also... I was looking at NVMe Gen4x4 drives at around $200 for 1TB, but then saw the EVO 970 Plus was out performing them, almost bought that on Monday for $199, but saw a Sabrient Gen4 for $168 with $11 coupon on Amazon and went with that... NOW Amazon has the EVO 970 Plus for $169... which ever way the wind blows is the best value it seems. Although, Amazon has those "morphing" prices that seem to change often, probably based on your search habits. $169 for the EVO 970 Plus 1TB vs. $539 for the 2TB? Maybe Amazon tells vendors where the majority of sales volume is coming (ie 1TB) and competitors are getting more sales through via a certain price and miraculously the Samsung EVO price drops to match in a few days!! I'm sure Amazon analytics provided to their vendors play a part, probably be back to $239 after Xmas.Freeb!rd - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
FYI, so the Sabrient Gen4 was $157.xx after coupon, still a great deal on a Gen4x4 drive for my new X570 motherboard.HarryVoyager - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
The pricing is what makes all of this somewhat nuts. When I rebuilt my machine a month or so ago I ended up going with the 660p because I could get the 2TB version for around $170.While it isn't near the top of the heap for the destroyer, I don't do transfers of much more than a few GB at a time, and those are limited more by my Internet connection than by the drive.
I've also got a professional grade SATA SSD, and despite its synthetic benchmarks being an order of magnitude lower than the 660p, I honestly can't tell a difference between what's installed on which. And I'm a heavy gamer who runs stuff that is notorious for slow load times and heavy RAM usuage. Even there, I'm not usually pulling more that 20Gb of data in a set, so it's just not a big difference.
dragosmp - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
QLC was supposed to help with this segmentation. Hard to make a low end drive much cheaper just by not adding a 2$ DRAM chip and some PCB traces.Crucial P1 tends to kinda fulfill the QLC promise. It is sometimes at or around 80$ on offer for 1TB, has good warranty and performs quite well:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2533?vs=22...
tlmiller76 - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
I gotta disagree with the P1. I have one (1TB), and to be honest, I hate it. It's just...garbage in every way. I actually HAD an SX6000 Pro 1TB (unfortunately forgot to swap it out before I sold the laptop it was in) and it was so much better than the P1 they weren't even in the same zip code.zmatt - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
IMO low end NVMe drives aren't worth considering at all. If you dont have the money for a Samsung Evo then dont both because you aren't really seeing the benefits. Obviously this doesn't apply in the case of a laptop or SFF where you may not have a choice.TheUnhandledException - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
It would be nice is low end NVMe drives were significantly cheaper but at least right now they are not. I don't really see the rationale for paying 2% less and getting 40% lower performance.sean8102 - Monday, February 3, 2020 - link
I upgraded from a 256GB SATA Samsung 840 Pro (my first SSD ever) to the HP EX 920 1TB and love it. Never thought I'd end up going with a HP SSD but their EX 9x0 product line is great. Thinking of getting another NVME drive just for games and going with the EX 950.