Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB
A quicker flash
SSD for data transfer in a flash
One of today’s fastest storage devices – and with 1TB of space it’s fairly priced
This is a fast NVME SSD, ready to install in the M.2 socket found in most recent desktop PCS, and the manufacturer’s quoted speeds of up to 3,500 MB/S reading and 3000MB/S writing certainly merit the ‘Pro’ tag, putting it among today’s fastest storage.
Yet, at under 130 quid for a full terabyte, it’s reasonably priced. If you don’t need that much space, the economics of SSD production have even better news for you: half the capacity costs less than half as much (£60 from Amazon www.snipca.com/33691).
Ignoring the claims made in product specs is a full-l-time job for us in the Computeractivetive labs, so as always we ran benchmarkhmark tests for ourselves to see how the 1TB XPG SX8200 Pro really performed.
In Crystaldiskmark’s tests, it hit Adata’s numbers pretty much on the nose, coming in fractionally faster on reads and fractionally slower on writes. But accessing tiny files in random positions slashed those speeds to 366MB/S reading and 267MB/S writing. Kingston’s A2000, for example (£140 from Amazon www.snipca.com/33693), managed over 500MB/S here.
Without making you wait several years for our verdict, we can’t test durability, but the XPG SX8200 Pro uses a type of silicon called 3D TLC that’s inherently longer-lasting than the cheaper QLC chips in rivals like Crucial’s P1 (£109 for 1TB from Amazon www.snipca. com/32924, see Issue 565, page 26).
Accordingly, the 1TB version is rated to survive more than three times the usage, at 640 terabytes written, while even the 512GB drive’s rating of half that is more than most PC users will ever reach. Adata also supplies the drive with a heat spreader attached (the silver metal plate seen in the photo above) to help ensure it won’t slow down due to thermal throttling under heavy load.
It has strong competition from the Kingston A2000, which we’ll review in an upcoming issue, but overall this is a very fast SSD for not too much more money than you’d pay for an average one.