The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium

AnandTech 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.