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 - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The ADATA SX6000 Pro is a bit slower overall on The Destroyer than the Mushkin Helix-L, but is basically tied with the Toshiba BG4, so it's in the right ballpark for an entry level NVMe drive. The performance is much higher than the SATA drives or the QLC-based Intel 660p.
The SX6000 Pro's average and 99th percentile latency scores on The Destroyer are both clearly better than the other entry-level NVMe SSDs in this batch, and are not far behind some of the more affordable high-end drives.
The Toshiba BG4 and Mushkin Helix-L both have moderately better average read latency scores than the SX6000 Pro, but the latter is way ahead when it comes to writes—the SX6000 Pro's average write latency is competitive with several high-end NVMe drives.
The 99th percentile read latency score for the SX6000 Pro isn't as good as most of the other NVMe drives, but it's still clearly better than the SATA drives or the QLC-based Intel 660p. For writes, the 99th percentile latency can't match the top-tier high-end drives but it is competitive with the high-end drives based on the SM2262EN controller that takes a similarly aggressive approach to SLC caching as the Realtek RTS5763DL.
Several of the entry-level NVMe drives we've tested score very well for efficiency over the course of The Destroyer thanks to a combination of decent performance and power savings from the lack of onboard DRAM. This is clearly not the case for the SX6000 Pro. It does use less energy in total than the most power-hungry high-end drives, but the Toshiba BG4 and Mushkin Helix-L both complete the test with comparable overall performance while using less than half as much energy.
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Samus - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
I don’t think you are being critical enough of this drive. It is appallingly bad. It’s basically outclassed by SATA drives from years ago in almost every metric except sequential performance (where NVMe will naturally excel)But real world performance is terrible, power usage is high (and it has broken devsleep) and it isn’t very cheap. When you consider reliability is a total u known I’m struggling to imagine a single person who would consider this.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Let me make it a bit clearer for you: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2533?vs=22...The MX500 beats the SX6000 Pro on just ONE of those performance metrics. The picture's not that different if you compare against a Samsung SATA drive. Overall performance is clearly much better than a SATA SSD. It's not appallingly bad. It just isn't a high-end NVMe drive.
DPUser - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Appallingly Clearer. : )Alistair - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
haha nice :)JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Based Billy Tallis *dabbing* on the n00bs in the comments section. FACTS don't care about your feelings, Samus. It's times like this I'm glad you can't edit your comments, since moments like these are eternalized forever.MFinn3333 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
To be fair, the Samsung 850 Pro does beat it in the sustained random read/writes, power efficiency of said read/writes and uses a lot less power while active idle.https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2310?vs=25...
(Blue is Samsung and Orange is ADATA because Samsung is blue in my mind).
To be fairer, the Samsung is at least five years old, costs three times as much if you can get it, and has an idle response that is 15X worse than the ADATA. The ADATA is clearly the better drive for 99% of the population.
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
It's absolutely appallingly bad. You can't simply excuse broken power management with "the other vendors messed it up too", the point is that none of those other vendors have messed it up NOW. Realtek failed to learn from and avoid their competitors' mistake, and by doing so have introduced their controller with a handicap versus the same competitors. It's also both unproven, slower, and more expensive than older controllers that do have a known track record, so that's four strikes against the RTS5763DL.In contrast, drives using the two-year-old SM2263XT are faster, cheaper, and to be blunt, just better. There is thus no reason why anybody would ever choose a drive using RTS5763DL, and its complete failure to compete is only going to become more apparent once the next-gen SMI and Phison controllers arrive (and E12 products go EOL and get huge discounts).
In short, while not as bad as Realtek's attempt at a SATA SSD controller, the RTS5763DL is just a plain bad product that simply cannot be recommended in any way shape or form.
milli - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Well look at this one again then: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15139/sus...I've learned from real-life usage that this test is one of the most important metrics that you will notice in your day to day usage. The Realtek is by far the fastest cacheless NVMe controller out there in this test.
Also while the drive lacks DEVSLP, statements like "broken power management" are just false. The graphs clearly show that it cuts power in half in each state. Lacking DEVSLP does not equal broken power management. ADATA even clearly states this on their website.
gregassagraf - Wednesday, July 21, 2021 - link
well... I installed the xpg Gammix s41 which is based in the same microcontroller! I lost more than an hour of battery life in my laptop and now sleep mode is basically useless. One big mistake in my part was caring only about read and write speeds. I can't wait to replace this drive, its driving me mad!mark625 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
The HP EX950 1TB has been my favorite value/$ drive for a while, and it costs a whole $7 more than the SX6000 Pro. It whomps the XPG drive in almost every test, and in many tests it is more than twice as fast.In what possible scenario would the XPG drive be a smarter purchase than the HP? None that I can see. This review is way too forgiving.