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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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.