The ADATA XPG SX950 480GB SSD Review: In Search of Premium
by Billy Tallis on October 9, 2017 8:00 AM ESTRandom Read Performance
Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.
The short-burst QD1 random read speed of the ADATA XPG SX950 is good, though Samsung still has a clear lead. The SX950 is 16% faster than the Crucial BX300 that uses the same NAND and controller.
Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.
With a longer test and higher queue depths, the ADATA SX950's standing drops somewhat, but it still outperforms most TLC SSDs and the Crucial BX300.
The power efficiency of the SX950 during random reads is decent but not outstanding. The planar MLC-based PNY CS2211 beats the SX950 on both performance and power efficiency, but otherwise the SX950 is only beat by a few other 3D NAND SSDs.
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For an MLC-based SSD, the ADATA SX950 does a poor job of scaling up random read performance with higher queue depths. Its QD1 performance is fine, but by QD8 it's lagging behind many of its competitors. The Crucial BX300 is marginally slower until QD32, where the SX950's performance starts to level off while the BX300 gets very close to the peak speeds reached by the best SATA SSDs.
Random Write Performance
Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.
After seeing clear indicators from the ATSB tests that the ADATA SX950 is very aggressive with SLC write caching, it's good to see that the QD1 burst random write performance is near the top of the charts.
As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.
On the longer random write test with higher queue depths included, the ADATA XPG SX950's random write score is unimpressive: barely faster than the TLC-based ADATA SU800 and well behind the Crucial and Samsung drives.
In spite of mediocre performance on the longer random write test, the SX950 delivers great power efficiency, in second place only slightly behind the Crucial MX300.
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The SX950's random write speed mostly levels off in the second half of the test as queue depths grow beyond 4, and even at QD32 the SX950 is not really close to saturating the SATA bus. But at QD1 and QD2, its performance is as good as any SATA drive and its power consumption is unbeatable.
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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