ADATA Ultimate SU800 512GB
The ultimate SATA drive? Not exactly...
WHAT WITH ALL THE lightning-fast PCI Express, M.2, and U.2 SSDs available to tease performance junkies with bandwidth measured in GB/s, it’s hard to get excited by a conventional SSD that chats casually to your motherboard over a SATA connection.
Even the fastest SATA drives are limited to about 550MB/s. But here’s the thing: If your motherboard only has SATA ports, and lacks support for features such as the SSD-friendly NVMe protocol, even with an add-in PCI Express card, achieving the full next-gen benefit of the latest and greatest SSDs makes for an expensive endeavor, one that includes at least a new mobo and probably a new CPU. Ouch.
Whisper this, but a decent SATA SSD actually gets the job done when it comes to day-to-day responsiveness from your PC. So, enter the new ADATA Ultimate SU800. It’s a conventional 2.5-inch SATA drive that’s hardly going to tear the PCI Express opposition a new one with numbers like 560MB/s reads and 520MB/s writes for this 512GB model. For the record, this family of SSDs tops out at 1TB; 128GB and 256GB models round out the full range for now.
Nor will the 90K maximum claimed IOPS performance turn many heads. That’s not even remarkable by SATA standards. Still, that’s not to say the SU800 is without innovation. Its key attraction is the use of high-density 3D triple-level-cell NAND memory, which helps to achieve a competitive price.
What’s more, the total bytes written rating of 400TB is a solid figure for a 512GB drive. You also get a software key for Acronis True Image HD, for those who need help with a little drive-cloning action, and a reasonable three-year warranty. However, if affordability is the aim, something usually has to give. In this case, ADATA’s choice of controller chipset is the most conspicuous candidate. It’s a modestly specced item, with four memory channels, namely the Silicon Motion SM2258.
CACHE REGISTER
But what does it all mean for performance? As ever, the prep process prior to testing was enlightening. Fully filling the SU800 with data before diving into the benchmark suite revealed patchy sustained performance, as the drive cycled through periods of faster and slower behavior. The claimed 520MB/s write speed is achieved via pseudo-SLC caching, and it did feel like it was filling and refreshing a cache of some kind over and over again.
So, it wasn’t a huge surprise to find variable write performance. A simple sequential test like ATTO gives numbers in line with that 520MB/s claim, but a more demanding metric, such as CrystalMark, reveals the SU800’s limitations, courtesy of a 385MB/s result for sequential write. That said, the 4K numbers hold no horrors: 37MB/s and 46MB/s reads in CrystalMark and AS SSD respectively are decent for this class of drive, as are 137MB/s and 117MB/s for writes. And the SU800 puts on a good show in our real-world 5GB compression and 30GB internal file copy tests.
The upshot is that ADATA has a decent drive on its hands, but not one with any world-beating attributes. The SU800 will likely live or die according to price. At $130, it’s competitive. Whether it’s compelling depends on the daily fluctuations of SSD prices. But we’d prefer this solid SSD from a known brand such as ADATA to rolling the dice on an unknown quantity to save a few bucks. –JEREMY LAIRD