ADATA SU630 480GB
Turns out QLC isn't quite more storage for free...
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. You might just get it. Like, say, affordable solidstate technology for mass storage. That’s the end game we’re all after, isn’t it? Kiss goodbye to slow, failure-prone magnetic hard drives. It’s also why the new ADATA SU630 exists. At least, that ought to be why it exists. To deliver more solid-state storage for less money than before, while perhaps compromising a little on performance. Hold those thoughts.
To cut to the chase, the ADATA SU630’s not-quite-USP is QLC, or quad-level memory cells; in this case, Intel’s QLC NAND, and thus the same memory chips as those used by the Crucial P1 (reviewed opposite). You should read that review for a little more insight into the technological nuances of QLC memory. Suffice to say here that QLC is the next step on, obviously enough, from TLC, or triplelevel cells, and the immediate benefit is more memory capacity per cell. The upshot should be cheaper SSDs, and with that a step closer to the aforementioned solid-state nirvana.
In this case, we’re talking old-school SATA connectivity and a 2.5-inch form factor, which is just dandy, given the entry-level mass storage remit. The headline figures ADATA claims look fine, too: 520MB/s for sequential reads and 450MB/s for writes. Admittedly, the 45,000 random read IOPS and 65,000 random writes aren’t the stuff of technological legend, but it’s hardly a horror show, either. More of a concern is the SU630’s claimed endurance. For this 480GB model, ADATA is pegging the drive at 100TB of total write endurance. That’s one third of the endurance ADATA says its TLC drives are capable of. Ouch. It’s the most obvious indication, on the spec sheet at least, that the increased capacity of QLC NAND comes at a cost.
While we’re talking speeds and feeds, we’ll note that ADATA does not specify the SU630’s controller, but it probably rocks a Maxio Technology MAS0902A-B2C. That’s on the basis that it’s one of only two controllers that claim support for QLC NAND, and the other is from Phison, a company ADATA is not previously known to have partnered.
ADATA also doesn’t divulge how much of the SU630’s QLC NAND is provisioned for operating in higher performance pseudo-SLC mode, for the purposes of providing a cache buffer before you hit the true performance of the QLC cells. However, it’s in the order of a few gigabytes. During our usual pre-test flight checks, which typically involve filling the drive to full at least once before wheels-up, we noted that the sequential performance of the SU630 cliff-edges very rapidly. And we do mean that fairly literally. After a few gigabytes of sequential work in line with the drive’s 500MB/s-plus claimed performance, throughput craters to around 38MB/s and stays there. Yuck.
That issue, obviously, doesn’t show up in the synthetic tests. The SU630 looks plausible enough in CrystalDiskMark and Anvil Storage. Indeed, that plausibility extends to random performance. OK, its performance for 4K random reads and writes at the various queue depths is not in flaming undergarments territory. But it’s OK. Definitively not OK is the SU630’s showing in our 30GB internal file copy test. Here, again, the true performance of that QLC NAND is exposed. It takes the SU630 nine minutes, 31 seconds to complete the test. Which is awful.
That doesn’t automatically have to be a deal-breaker, of course. If you’re not regularly shunting large files around, it could even be irrelevant. The caveat to that, we’d argue, is that if you’re going to tolerate both poor underlying performance and limited endurance, you’ll want something in return. That something would be a ridiculously low price. And while cheap, the SU630 isn’t nearly cheap enough.