The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium
by Billy Tallis on October 9, 2017 8:00 AM 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 SX950 continues the trend of being reasonably fast when fresh, but much slower when full. Its average data rate on the Light test is almost as fast as the Samsung 850 Pro when the test is run on an empty drive, but when the drive is full it returns the lowest average data rate score in its class.
There usually isn't much to look at in the latency results for the Light test; most SATA drives perform very similarly. The ADATA SX950 is normal when the drive is fresh, but when the drive is filled before running the test, the results are very unlike any other SATA SSD we've tested. With a 99th percentile latency of over 30ms (dwarfing the Crucial MX300's 6.5ms), it's clear the SX950 does not manage its background processing properly.
The Light test is easy enough that the average read latency of the SX950 is normal whether or not the drive was filled before running the test. The average write latency is still several times higher in the full-drive case, and is twice that of the next-slowest drive in this bunch.
As with the average latency results, the 99th percentile read latency of the SX950 is not appreciably higher than normal when the Light test is run on a full drive, but on the write side latency is out of control. The Crucial BX300 has a substantially higher 99th percentile write latency when the test is run on an empty drive, but it doesn't go to pieces when the test is run on a full drive.
Energy usage by the ADATA SX950 is again quite good when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drive is full, the energy usage still falls within the acceptable range, but is unimpressive.
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Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
Nanu-nanu, as you centaurians say.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
*beep-borp* I am an alien. I am superior. *borp-borp-beep*svan1971 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
I stopped reading after I don't identify as human. To much self loathing from a no doubt educated idiot.svan1971 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
LMAO Perfect...Samus - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Even if the SU950 was cheaper than the BX300, I'd still rather have the BX300. I've never had to send a drive in to Crucial for warranty. Ever. Intel and Crucial have a 0% defect rate in my workplaces.Samsung had a number of 840 EVO's go sour years ago that resulted in a number of drive being sent in and replaced with new drives with new firmwares. In 2014 an 840 Pro even went bad, although I realize that is quite an anomaly for Samsung. The 840 EVO's were well documented to have issues.
I've seen a number of ADATA SP500's fail, they just drop and stop detecting at POST. Before Barefoot 3, OCZ drives had all the typical issues Sandforce drives were notorious for having until the SF-2281 launched and firmware matured. Recent OCZ drives, even the ARC100 (the cheapest Barefoot drive) is reasonably reliable. One was mailed in a few months ago for warranty due to Windows detecting SMART errors. The drive didn't fail, and data was cloned to an advance replacement OCZ mailed out next-day. The OCZ warranty process was excellent, but that doesn't help a drive began to fail.
Two Mushkin Reactors suffered the same issue seemingly years apart, they would randomly not detect, give a BSOD, and so on. The data was cloned to replacement SSD's and the Mushkin drives were RMA'd (which was a complete pain in the ass compared to OCZ with a 2 week turnaround no less) and the drives were fleabayed.
Granted, even Intel isn't immune to problems. Fortunately I have no SSD535's out in the field. These drives are notorious for self destructing from write amplification wear, and even though a firmware was issues to fix it recently, most of those drives have already killed themselves, and if you have an OEM model like a Lenovo, you can't apply the firmware (and Lenovo - reflecting their typical "quality" support - hasn't issued a firmware update even a year after Intel made it available.)
Overall, my point is, why would anybody buy a drive from someone other than Intel, Micron/Crucial, or Samsung? It's just a ridiculous gamble and is unlikely to save you money. There are niche drives like the Reactor that is still the cheapest 1TB SSD, so there are exceptions, but what exactly is ADATA bringing to the table that Samsung isn't with the 750, Crucial isn't with the BX300, and Intel isn't with the 600p?
ddriver - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
You poor peasants and your precious money. One's social standing is measured by how much one has spent on hardware, not the actual value of the purchase, and of course, how much RGB LEDs it has.Silly ADATA, still haven't figured out how to justify the higher cost of ownership due to the lack of vertical integration. 9 letters - RGB LED FTW. Why is the industry sleeping, we have RGB LEDs on mobos, coolers, ram, mice, keyboards, but not on SSD? Or maybe they are saving that for the next quantum leap in technology that's gonna leave people dazzled.
What intel brings with the 600p is hard to topple, it sure ain't easy to make an NVME drive that lousy. I also like how certain fairly expressive enterprise intel ssd drives behave when they run out of write cycles. While other vendors drives remain read-only, giving you the possibility to retrieve or use the existing data at your leisure, intel had the ingenious idea that such drives should brick themselves on the next post cycle. Such a great and highly useful feature. Who wouldn't want that?
Reflex - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
@samus You poor peasant! You poor poor peasant!Golgatha777 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Anecdotal evidence to support your last paragraph. I have probably 20 or so Intel, Crucial, and Samsung drives (75%+ being Crucial drives) spread around laptops, desktops, and even a couple of game consoles. Not one failure in the bunch. I did have to flash one of my M500 drives due to a post error, but the issue was well documented and a fix was issued within a month of it being reported by Crucial. I do own a couple of Sandisk drives, but I did my research and they use Marvell controllers and Micron RAM, so I felt like those weren't a gamble.Golgatha777 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
That should be Sandisk RAM for the Sandisk drives (Ultra IIs), not Micron.leexgx - Monday, October 16, 2017 - link
but this is a MLC drive so probably outlast most other drives