The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution

Conclusion

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.

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.