ADATA XPG SX930 SSD: Will gamers bite the bait?

Second time lucky?

The name ADATA might not ring any bells, but the Taiwanese-based company is a huge deal in its home country. As one of the largest manufacturers of flash-based memory products, ADATA’s flash storage solutions are found not just in consumer devices, but also is widely used in the commercial and industrial space, in digital signages, automated machinery, data centers and more.

A year ago, we reviewed ADATA’s Premier Pro SP920SS drive, which was a drive targeted at mainstream users and featured Marvell’s 88SS9189 controller and Micron’s new 128Gbit NAND. Though it was attractively priced and came with loads of accessories, its performance was not quite up to scratch. This time, ADATA is back again with their new XPG SX930 drive which features JMicron’s new JMF670H controller. Will it be a case of second time lucky for ADATA? Let’s find out.

The ADATA XPG SX930

The ADATA XPG SX930 is a new SSD that is targeted at gamers and enthusiasts. And if you are scratching your head wondering what “XPG” means, it stands for “Xtreme Performance Gear” and also represents ADATA’s flagship line of SSDs.

Inside, the highlight has to be the use of JMicron’s JMF670H controller. The JMF670H controller was announced last year at Computex 2014 and is JMicron’s current flagship controller. JMicron is no stranger to the SSD business and has been producing controllers for SSDs as early as 2008. The brand has maintained a relatively low profile in the past couple of years but they are back in the a big way with the JMF670H controller, and have plans for more controllers next year.

Though ADATA has positioned the XPG SX930 SSD as their high-end drive, the truth is that the specifications of the JMF670H controller suggest otherwise. While most high-end SSD controllers employ an eight-channel design, the JMF670H supports just four-channels, which is typical of mainstream controllers like Marvell’s SS88SS9175. Additionally, it uses a single-core ARM968 processor, which is the smallest and lowest power processor in the ARM9 family. From the looks out of it, the JMF670H looks more like a competitor to other mainstream controllers such as Silicon Motion's SM2256EN and Phison's S8.

What’s more interesting about this controller is that it supports a wide variety of different NAND types including 3D V-NAND - but not TLC NAND. This makes it an attractive choice for SSD manufacturers who do not develop their own controller nor have their own NAND as it gives them greater freedom to source their NAND from suppliers like Samsung, Micron and Toshiba.

As for NAND, ADATA has turned to Micron, specifically their 16nm 128Gbit NAND. However, for the XPG SX930 drive, they are using higher quality binned NAND which they call “Enterprise-grade MLC Plus NAND”. Since ADATA buys NAND memory in bulk, it sorts them and allocates them for their various flash storage devices. Higher quality NAND ends up in their enterprise products and the XPG SX930 drive. This is also the reason why ADATA is able to offer a 5-year long warranty on the XPG SX930 - something usually reserved only for premium high-end SSDs.

To boost performance, the XPG SX930 also has what ADATA calls “pSLC Cache Technology”. What really happens is that a portion of the NAND die is dedicated to operate in SLC mode to improve random write performance. It is really just a variation of other caching technologies seen in drives like the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and SanDisk Extreme Pro. While this form of caching technology has proved useful for SSDs using TLC NAND, we have seen little evidence to suggest that it is beneficial for SSDs using MLC NAND, but perhaps the XPG SX930 would prove to be the exception?

One thing sorely missing from the ADATA XPG SX930 SSD is support for hardware encryption. This is a feature that is being offered by many entry-level drives these days and its exclusion, though not an outright deal-breaker, is a real pity. On the flip side, the XPG SX930 comes with a 3.5-inch HDD adapter (useful for users with older computer chassis) and a code to download a copy of Acronis TrueImage HD for easy cloning and migration.

Finally, there’s the ADATA SSD Toolbox, a nifty utility that lets users easily update their drive’s firmware as well as run diagnostic tests to check on its health status. SSD Toolbox also lets users securely wipe their drive and even has a gauge that shows the estimated lifespan of the drive. 

Test Setup

The ADATA XPG SX930 will be tested on our dedicated storage testbed:

• Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
• 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 7

Our revised benchmark ditches older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also includes an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance. The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

• AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
• PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
• Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)

We are pitting the ADATA XPG SX930 against some of the most popular mainstream SSDs in the market today, including the Samsung SSD 850 Evo, Crucial MX100 and Plextor M6S. It will also be interesting to see how the XPG SX930 matches up against the older Premier Pro SP920SS and also the Corsair Force LX, which is powered by a Silicon Motion controller.

Here is the list of drives tested:

• ADATA XPG SX930
• ADATA Premier Pro SP920SS
• OCZ Trion 100
• OCZ ARC 100
• Samsung SSD 850 Evo
• Crucial MX100
• Plextor M6S
• Corsair Force LX

Timing tests

The timing tests are our evaluation of how the SSDs will perform in real-world everyday situations, namely booting up from a cold start, reboot and launching applications. As for the applications used, we made the drives launch 11 applications from the Adobe CS6 suite of utilities simultaneously; they include resource-intensive applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Premiere Pro, amongst others. As a point of reference, a 7200rpm mechanical hard disk would take over 5 minutes to open all the applications.

The ADATA XPG SX930’s timings in our tests were nearly identical to the older ADATA Premier Pro SP920SS, which isn’t good news as the Premier Pro SP920SS was one of the slower drives we have tested in our timing tests. This also means there's a significant gulf in performance between the XPG SX930 and the faster mainstream drives. For example, the XPG SX930’s cold start timing of 27 seconds was a good 1.1 seconds off the Crucial MX100’s 25.9 seconds. When it came to rebooting, the XPG SX930 was 1.2 seconds slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo’s 27 seconds. Finally, the XPG SX930 was 0.8 seconds slower than the Samsung’s 12 seconds when it came to launch apps.

The difference between the XPG SX930 and the quickest drives in all scenarios was about a second on average, which is a fairly noteworthy amount of time especially when you consider that SSDs are so quick. If it's any consolation, the thing is that most users will hardly notice the difference in real world usage, but if you are a stickler for performance, this is worth taking note.

PCMark 7 results

PCMark 7 is a benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.

Fortunately, the ADATA XPG SX930 redeemed itself somewhat on PCMark 7, recording a very respectable score of 5317, a very significant improvement of around 9% over the older ADATA Premier Pro SP920SS. It also puts the XPG SX930 squarely in the middle of the pack as only the Samsung SSD 850 Evo, Plextor M6S and Corsair Force LX recorded higher scores. Analyzing the detailed breakdown of the scores, we can see that the XPG SX930 was very competitive across all test scenarios.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results

CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data. The ADATA XPG SX930’s sequential read and write speeds were quite encouraging as read speeds were high while write speeds were respectable, considering it uses 128Gbit NAND. Its sequential write speed of 453.6MB/s marked a 25% improvement over the older ADATA Premier Pro SP920SS. But moving on to the other test scenarios, performance started to dip. On the 512K, 4K and 4K with 32 queue depth scenarios, read speeds were surprisingly poor. On the intensive 4K with 32 queue depth workload for example, the XPG SX930’s read speeds were only 277.7MB/s, a whopping 30% lesser than the Premier Pro SP920SS. Its write speeds were nothing to shout about either, except that on the 512K workload, it racked up the highest write speed of 448.6MB/s, but that was only 3% more than the second-placed Plextor M6S.

AS SSD 1.7.4739 results

AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using the SandForce SF-2281 controller cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of the strong advantages of this controller. Therefore, this is a useful benchmark because drives that use the SF-2281 controller or similar won't gain an upper hand.

The ADATA XPG SX930’s performance on AS SSD wasn’t too encouraging. While sequential and 4K read and write speeds were decent, its performance tapered off strongly when it came to the demanding 4K with 64 queue depth workload. Here, its read speed was only an abysmal 224.36MB/s - nearly 40% less than the older ADATA Premier Pro SPG920SS. If it’s any consolation, at least its write speeds held up, perhaps a sign that its pSLC Cache Technology is working. The XPG SX930’s speeds on the Copy benchmark was disappointing as well as it was one of the slower drives. 

Iometer results (Part 1)

Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face. Bearing in the mind the specifications of the JMicron JMF670H controller and the ADATA XPG SX930’s performance thus far, we did not have high hopes for the drive on Iometer. Performance on Iometer was generally disappointing. Its showing on the 64K streaming read workload was decidedly average; and it wasn’t any better on the 64K streaming writes and File Server workloads either, where it was in the middle of the pack. On the Web Server workload, the XPG SX930 found itself towards the tail end of the pack, and was only very slightly quicker than the last-placed OCZ Trion 100.

Iometer results (Part 2)

Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. Looking at the response times of the drive, we can see that the ADATA XPG SX930’s response times on the 64K streaming reads workload was its best. On the other workloads, we can clearly see that its response times were amongst the highest in the pack, which corroborates with its poor IOPs readings on the previous page.

Missing the mark

With the release of ADATA’s new XPG SX930 SSD, we are also seeing the return of an old name - JMicron - to the game. As we mentioned at the start of the review, JMicron is no stranger to SSDs, but the reason they fell out of the radar for the past couple of years was because its performance just wasn’t competitive enough. In fact, the old JMicron JMF602 controller was notorious for delivering less than ideal performance. And unfortunately for JMicron, it seems that little has changed.

In our tests of the ADATA XPG SX930, we found that the performance offered by the new JMF670H controller was disappointing. While sequential read and write speeds were decent and capable of going toe-to-toe with the fastest drives in the mainstream segment, its performance, especially when it came to intensive workloads with high queue depths, was found lacking. Read speeds, in particular, took serious hits whenever we increased the queue depth. Write speeds, on the other hand, held up quite well, presumably thanks to ADATA’s pSLC Cache Technology, but it’s not quite enough as other drives such as the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and Plextor M6S continued to outperform it.

According to ADATA, the XPG SX930 is supposed to be the company’s new flagship drive. However, the results here do not support this claim. Overall, the older Premier Pro SP920SS was faster and more consistent, especially when it came to handling smaller data blocks and higher queue depths. 

On the bright side, the ADATA XPG SX930 was more than a match for the Cosair Force LX. The Corsair Force LX is an interesting comparison because it is powered by Silicon Motion’s SM2246EN controller, one of JMicron JMF670H’s competitors in the SSD controller space. The Silicon Motion SM2246EN is also used in Crucial's BX100, so a win over the Corsair Force LX could be a sign of greater things to come for JMicron. It will be interesting to see how things develop in the SSD space for the next couple of months as there’s been a flurry of new controller releases from the likes of JMicron, Silicon Motion and Phison. This in turn means more choices for SSD manufacturers without their own controller technology and we could see further price drops for SSDs in general as competition heats up.

Priced at S$159 for the 240GB version that is reviewed here, the ADATA XPG SX930 is neither the most affordable nor most expensive drive, and finds itself somewhere in the middle of the pack. This also means that it is a great deal more affordable than the older Premier Pro SP920SS, which at S$191, is quite unrealistically priced in our opinion considering Samsung’s very excellent SSD 850 Evo retails for just S$169. And therein lies the biggest problem for ADATA. At S$169, the Samsung SSD 850 Evo represents tremendous value in the mainstream SSD space. It offers very good overall performance and also comes with a 5-year long warranty, which matches ADATA’s offer. It also comes with a data migration utility and loses out only to ADATA’s bundled 3.5-inch HDD adapter. But considering the Samsung’s excellent performance, this is something we are willing to overlook.

Nevertheless, the ADATA XPG SX930 could still appeal to penny-pinchers. It may not be the most affordable - that honor goes to the recently reviewed OCZ Trion 100 - but it does come with all the accessories and utilities that you may need. Remember, most entry-level SSDs come as is with no accessories or cloning utility. If you need a 3.5-inch HDD adapter or a cloning utility, ADATA has got you covered.

All things considered, the ADATA XPG SX930 is, like its performance, a rather average drive. But even though performance was disappointing, it redeems itself by being quite attractively priced and offering accessories that might be useful. And that might be enough to sway some users.

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