The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium
by Billy Tallis on October 9, 2017 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
When the Heavy test is run on a fresh drive, the ADATA XPG SX950 delivers a good average data rate that is a bit higher than the Crucial BX300 and close to the level of Samsung's SATA SSDs. But when the drive is full, the SX950 suffers greatly in the manner of the SU800 and the Crucial MX300, while the BX300 is minimally affected.
Both the average and 99th percentile latencies highlight how poorly the SX950 performs when the Heavy test is run on a full drive, but the latency when the test is run on a fresh drive is normal.
The average read and write latencies of the SX950 are both significantly higher when the Heavy test is run on a full drive, but the write latency is again far more strongly affected. For both reads and writes, the full-drive performance is better than the TLC-based ADATA SU800, but nowhere close to the standard set by the Crucial BX300.
The MLC-based SSDs almost all show very little degradation in 99th percentile read and write latencies when the drive is full. The exceptions are the ADATA SX950 and the DRAMless OCZ VX500. The 99th percentile read latency of the SX950 is higher when the drive is full, but still better than the planar TLC drives. The 99th percentile write latency on the other hand grows by more than an order of magnitude to almost 95ms.
The ADATA SX950 scores very well on energy usage when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive: it matches the DRAMless OCZ VX500 and comes close to the Crucial MX300, which uses a Marvell controller fabbed on a newer and lower-power process. The Crucial BX300 uses 14% more energy largely due to taking longer overall to complete the test. The situation is reversed when running the test on a full drive: the ADATA SX950 takes much longer to complete the test and is doing a lot of costly background garbage collection, though it still at least beats the planar TLC SSDs and ADATA's own TLC-based SU800.
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meacupla - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
ADATA's pricing of their lower end is usually in line with the competition. Or, at least, the last drive I bought from them was.This one... not so much
KAlmquist - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
If the intention is for these drives to sell at well below MSRP, Adata is not getting off to a good start. Amazon and B&H Photo are both pricing the 480GB model $20 higher than the MSRP, and Newegg is not selling it at all. My guess is that something tipped the retailers off to the fact that there is not going to be a lot of demand for this product, so they either went for a high markup (to compensate for the cost of holding a low turnover item in stock), or in the case of Newegg, decided to pass on it entirely.I recently bought a Samsung 850 Pro, which proves that there is still at least one person who is (stupid? gullible? bat shit crazy?) enough to pay up for a premium SATA SSD. :-) With a premium SATA SSD, you are paying for:
1) Consistent performance. For example, in the Anandtech Storage Bench light test, the ADATA drive does well if the drive is empty, but performance plummets if the drive is full. The Samsung 850 Pro performs almost identically regardless of whether the drive is full or empty.
2) Reliability. I have no reason to believe the Adata drive is unreliable, but the Samsung 850 Pro has a 10 year warranty and, more important, a long track record in the field. So the 850 Pro wins this category as well.
IndianaKrom - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
A couple years ago when I picked up an 850 pro/1 TB, it was at the time the best SATA SSD. Today it is still the best SATA SSD, and it will probably always be. At this stage I would be surprised if anyone manages to extract any more performance out of SATA than what an 850 Pro can do._mb - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Where is the "Performance Consistency" test?I hope you guys haven't stopped doing that one as that test is the most interesting one and sets you guys apart from other reviewers which don't do that.
Billy Tallis - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
The performance consistency test will be reintroduced soon. Since it was the least relevant to real-world desktop usage and the most likely to kill drives, it's been the lowest priority to run on the new 2017 testbed. Now that I'm pretty much done running all my drives through the 2017 test suite, I'll start going back and running the new performance consistency test on them. Those results will probably start being included in the SSD reviews in November, and they'll be added to the Bench database as they're available.Maleorderbride - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I realize this is not on you Billy, but why is the Mushkin Enhanced Reactor series not part of the 2017 SSD bench? That series is one of only four that someone might actually purchase knowingly.xype - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
So, at which point will it become a waste of time to review SSDs? Unless such a review only takes 15 minutes, I’d assume there’s plenty of hardware where the conclusions is not a simple "Get a Samsung" >90% of the time — or am I being too optimistic?RaistlinZ - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Q: "So, at which point will it become a waste of time to review SSDs?"A: 2016
xype - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Yeah :-/jabber - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I don't care. The issue is that SATAIII is saturated and all we need now are reliable mainstream hum drum SSD drives for a cheap price. There is nothing else left to achieve on SATAIII. It's like RAM FFS it's all within a few % whether you spend $100 or $200. They get away with it by adding pointless crap like RGB. I bet by XMAS we'll see SATAIII SSD drives with built in RGB on the edges. Anything to cover up and distract from the fact they are no longer anything special and all the same for day to day purposes.