PC World - USA (2019-02)

64 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019

REVIEWS ADATA XPG SX8200 PRO NVME SSD

call me Harpo—Adata wasn’t

kidding. It competes extremely

well with the 970 Pro until you write

a very large amount of data. Even

when it runs out of secondary or

tertiary cache, it writes at a crisp

1GBps. I’ve seen NVMe SSDs drop

as low as 450MBps off of cache.

You’ll see the 1TB SX8200 Pro

in the light blue bars compared to

the aforementioned 1TB 970 Pro

and Intel’s 960GB 905P, a

fantastically long-lived and fast,

but extremely expensive

competitor. CrystalDiskMark 6

ranked the SX8200 Pro as

performing roughly on a par

overall with both those drives.

Somewhat surprisingly, the

SX8200 Pro matched the 905P’s

prodigious seek times in AS SSD.

The SX8200 Pro did better

than fine in our 48GB real world

copy tests. Quite a bit better.

The SX8200 Pro does

eventually slow down when

writing, but not until relatively late

in the process. 15 percent (the

amount of dynamic cache) of 1TB

is 150GB, which is larger than

most full 4K movies. We noticed

writes slowing from about

1.8GBps to 1GBps during a

500GB copy.

The Adata SX8200 features lightning fast seeks. Better than the

Samsung 970 Pro, though there is a lot of variance in this test

from run to run.

Access Time

(Write)

Access Time

(Read)

AS SSD 2.0 seek performance

(milliseconds)

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

0.034

0.038

0.024

0.022

0.027

0.019

Intel 905P

Adata SX9=8200 Samsung 970 Pro

For a drive as cheap as the Adata SX8200 to hold its own

against Intel’s 905P and Samsung’s 970 Pro is impressive.

Random(Q =32, T=1) Write 4K

Sequential Write

4K (Q =32, T=1)

Random(Q =32, T=1) Read 4K

Sequential Read

4K (Q =32, T=1)

CrystalDiskMark 6

(MBps)

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

418

2,717

559

3,525

479

3,063

625

3,221

549

2,379

586

2,704

Intel 905P

Adata SX9=8200 Samsung 970 Pro