ADATA XPG SX950U 240GB SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 22 of 22 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

From an SSD point of view, the SX950U ticks most right boxes. A really fast Silicon Motion SM2258 4-channel controller paired with advanced SLC Caching algorithms and a chunk of DDR3 DRAM for caches paired with Micron TLC written NAND, really makes this a proper performing 2.5" SATA3 SSD. Pretty much the SX950U  can chew anything you throw at it while remaining close to advertised write performance, so ADATA covers their bases alright. The one thing lacking is information on TBW values? I requested these but did not receive them just yet.

Considering it's using Micron 64-layer TLC NAND, I am not worried here. The use of the dual-cache is sweet, they add a DRAM cache alongside a huge SLC written cache buffer. The ever so important factor, of course, is pricing, you'll be able to spot this unit at roughly 29 cents per GB for our tested 240 GB model. With TLC, it'll remain to be a mid-range SSD, however, we felt that perf was solid for its price/performance point of view. Mid-range these days is last year's high-end performance. And with this kind of performance, you overall remain in the high-end segment on SATA3. 



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SU950U

ATTO

IOPS

TBW

Capacity

Seq.Read
(MB/sec)

Seq.Write (MB/sec)

4K Random Read

4K Random Write

120GB

560

420

50K

75K

100TB

240GB

560

520

80K

85K

200TB

480GB

560

520

85K

85K

400TB

960GB

560

520

80K

80K

800TB


Overall

Right, an or any SSD in the year 2018 is enjoyable. Very much so. If you put a drive like this into your SATA 3 compatible laptop or SATA 3 compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you when comparing with an HDD. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series. Make no mistake, replacing an HDD with an SSD in your desktop PC or laptop eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That, combined with the maxed out performance SATA 3 offers these days, is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make to your computer this day and age. 

Your SATA controller

Some overall recommendations then. Should you be in the market for a SATA 3 SSD then we have a couple of hints. First and foremost if you have a SATA 2 controller only on your motherboard, then you'll be limited at roughly 270 MB/sec read and writes. SATA 3 (6Gbps) will free you up from that allowing the SSD to perform in the 500 MB/sec range. It is, however, important that you connect your SSD to the proper controller. Internal chipset-based integrated SATA 6G controllers are the best, thus say the Z270 / Z370 / X299 Intel SATA3 interface or the AMD X370 / X470 / X399 internal chipset interface. If you run the SSD from a 3rd party controller like, say, a Marvell / ASMedia 6G controller, you will often see lower performance. The new AMD chipsets offer fantastic performance btw. The more recent Asmedia controllers we spotted lately on motherboards also offer good performance, albeit still 20% ~ 25% slower than Intel's controllers. Also, make sure you run your drive in AHCI mode, it does make such a difference in performance, a big difference.

  

 

Concluding

TLC NAND has become the new acceptable standard, they last you a long time and with modern caches, the write performance drop we have seen say a year or two ago, simply has vanished. And at roughly 29 cents per GB with a 5-year warranty, that makes the SX950U series very price competitive. Realistically though anything from a proper brand in the TLC SATA3 space will perform roughly similar. Seen overall from the charts, this SSD sits int he middle but has extra stamina with long sustained writes thanks to that huge SLC cache.

Overall you're looking at solid performance in that all to familiar 450/500MB write performance range. The 5-years warranty I wholeheartedly agree with, that's a good move from ADATA. This SSD does not suffer from the TLC write hole (slowing down once caches run out). Performance wise it's mostly, all the same, these days, ergo the biggest move in the storage industry right now is the quest for more capacity and proper endurance with SATA 6 Gbit/s storage units. We need multiple Terabyte SSDs as most people will want to ditch the traditional mechanical head based HDDs with their rotating platters, But I guess that way will be paved once QLC NAND reaches the masses. Both from a hardware and performance point of view in the SATA3 space, we see only positives. And combined with this price and a 5-year warranty, we can wholeheartedly recommend this SSD as a very viable and speedy one for any storage needs and your stringent requirements.

Update: added TBW values in the upper table.

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