The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution
by Billy Tallis on December 18, 2019 12:30 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro has the worst overall performance on the Light test out of all the NVMe drives in this batch, though several drives with better peak performance are slower when the test is run on a full drive.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the SX6000 Pro are high for a NVMe drive, but it doesn't lose much performance when the test is run on a full drive so those worst-case scores are still better than the SATA drives. Most of the other low-end NVMe SSDs can degrade to SATA or worse performance.
The average read latency of the SX6000 Pro is strongly affected by the drive being full, while the average write latency is completely unaffected. None of the other low-end NVMe drives keep write latency so low when the test is run on a full drive.
The 99th percentile read and write scores for the SX6000 Pro are all good, but the solid write QoS even for a full drive is impressive.
The energy usage of the SX6000 Pro over the course of the Light test is again roughly twice that of the other DRAMless NVMe SSDs, but it's not particularly high when compared to NVMe SSDs in general.
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otonieru - Sunday, May 10, 2020 - link
Well, there's this scenario where in some region in the world, HP ssd is simply nonexistent in market, and when they do, the price is wayy higher compared to original price. So... ?rocky12345 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
So basically if you just want more ssd storage that is more cost effective then go for one of these dram less drives. If you care about performance and don't mind a bit of a extra cost then pick up a drive with a decent dram cache.My own personal wants/needs require a drive with a DRAM cache and any of these drives with the realtek chipset and any other one with no dram cache support is a huge no go for me.
NewMaxx - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Thank you for the review.Some reviewers have speculated that these newer Realtek controllers are using MLC rather than SLC mode. Your results to some degree support this conjecture. I personally did not expect to see that on a TLC drive, but what are your thoughts on the subject?
NewMaxx - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
I'd like to add that I'm not supporting that viewpoint - full-drive SLC is in-line with ADATA's design principles on drives like this and the SU750 - but I'm curious about your take on those other reviews.Billy Tallis - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
The official spec sheet from ADATA says SLC caching, but I doubt those are actually written by people who would know better if it was MLC caching. The MLC caching hypothesis definitely explains why the cache is slower than usual for an SLC cache, and probably also why the folding process seems to be so slow. I'm not sure if it explains why the full-drive ATSB runs do comparatively well, and I'm still puzzled about the apparent lack of effect from HMB.NewMaxx - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
Thank you for the reply. It'll be interesting to compare this to the RTS5762 drives.TheWereCat - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
It's only 10€ cheaper than SX8200 Pro where I live.127€ vs 137€ for 1TB.
LMonty - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Good thing I saw this review before buying one for my laptop! Battery life would have been impacted.The_Assimilator - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Simple maxim in the PC space: if you see "Realtek", avoid.crimson117 - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Good luck buying a motherboard.