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Review: ASATA |
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ADATA was founded in 2001 and their aim was
to become the leader in memory solutions. Some might say that’s not an easy
task to achieve, but over the years ADATA managed to establish their name as
one of the leading manufacturers when it comes to memory solutions.
ADATA has a variety of storage solutions
from USB2/USB3 flash drives to external HDD’s, RAM, memory cards, Solid State
Drives, and will cover almost every need for storage that you might have. You
can take a closer look at their products here.
You can find out more info about ADATA here,
and also check some of their milestones.
ADATA was kind enough to send me their
Premier Pro SP900 128GB SSD for a review. Before we take a closer look, we
notice that the capacity of the drive is 128GB and not the typical 120GB that
we see with most SandForce based SSD’s. ADATA has tweaked the firmware of the
drive so that the extra spare capacity can now be used to increase the capacity
of the drive.
It’s time to take a closer look at the
ADATA SP900 SSD and give the drive a chance to prove how much of an 'Unbeatable
Upgrade' the ADATA SP900 really is.
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the
package and what comes shipped with.
Packaging
Box front
Box rear
The packaging of the ADAT SP900 is simple
and focuses more on the drive and less on the overall look. At the back my main
focus is the sticker that gives you an idea of the performance of this SSD.
Inside the box
Inside the box you will find a 3.5” bracket,
two sets of mounting screws, a quick start guide, the drive,a card with the instructions
on how to download the cloning software, and a 60 day trial of Norton Internet
Security.
A closer look at the drive
Front side of the ADATA SP900
Drive underside
Visually the drive looks clean and simple.
It has a nice Black/White colour scheme and a brushed finish make it more
appealing to the eye.
Now let’s look at what’s inside.
On
the top side we can see eight NAND chips manufactured by Micron.
On
the bottom we can see another eight NAND chips by Micron and the SandForce controller.
A
closer look at the Micron Asynchronous NAND,
and
a picture of the SandForce controller.
Specifications
The following specifications can be found at
the ADATA website.
From the above pictures we can get a more
detailed view of the specifications of the ADATA SP900 SSD.
CrystalDIskInfo
Above
we can see some info about the ADATA SP900 128GB SSD.
Let’s head to the next page where we
take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.
Test machine
For this review I will be using a computer
with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: AsRock Z68 Extreme 4 (Intel Z68
chipset) - Processor: Intel 2nd generation
Core i5 2500K - RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper X DDR3 1600MHz (dual channel)
- GFX: Onboard Intel HD 3000
- Sound: Onboard Realtek ALC889 HD audio
controller - Hard disk OS: Western Digital Blue 500GB
- PSU: Corsair CX430 430W
- Display: Futsiju Siemens 22”
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit with
Service Pack 1
The ADATA SP900 SSD was connected to the Intel
native SATA 6Gbps (port 1) on the Z68 motherboard of our review PC and all
tests on the drive were carried out with the drive connected to this port.
AHCI mode was also selected for all drives
in the UEFI of our test PC, and all tests were carried out in this mode.
The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review
PC were the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 10.6.0.1002.
Test applications
To test the performance of the ADATA SP900 SSD,
I will be using the following test applications in this review.
- HD Tune
Pro - ATTO
- Iometer
- AS SSD
Benchmark - CrystalDiskMark
- Anvil’s
Storage Utilities
Test procedures
I will start off our testing procedures
explanation by stating that I did not run many synthetic benchmarks on the ADATA
SP900 SSD. You may ask why I have run so few synthetic benchmarks?
SSD technology has moved so fast in the
last couple of years, that basic synthetic benchmarks alone are now of very
limited use, as they don't really tell us much about performance and how the
drive will behave in the real world. I have therefore decided to show some
basic benchmarks for the ADATA SP900 SSD, and will complement this with
advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show how
the ADATA SP900 SSD performs in the real world.
The reality of SSD performance
While I can easily show you which SSD is
technically the faster, when you use one of these modern SSDs as an operating
system drive it becomes very difficult to tell them apart as far as performance
is concerned.
A typical use of a small capacity SSD at
the moment is to have your operating system and applications installed onto the
SSD. The performance difference compared to a traditional HDD is enormous,
however when you start to compare SSD to SSD the difference becomes almost
impossible to detect.
Let’s look at why this is the case.
Drive A can boot to the desktop in 8.11
seconds, and drive B can boot to the desktop in 8.12 seconds, the difference in
time is milliseconds, and can one really tell the difference?
The fact is, all modern SSDs are only
ticking over when they are only running the OS and launching applications, it’s
only when you get to some of the larger capacity SSDs, with enough free space
to be able to hold the actual data that you’re going to be working with, be
that video, audio or pictures, for example, that you actually get a tangible
difference in performance. This is where the SSDs with the better sequential
performance start to pull well ahead of the SSDs which have lower sequential
read/write performance.
Small file random IOPS vs sequential performance
IOPS
This is a fairly complex subject, but I
will do my best to explain things in a manner that is easy to understand.
The term IOPS is the amount of input or
output transactions that can take place in a one second interval, so for
example, if an SSD is quoted as being able to cope with 20,000 4K random write
IOPS, then the SSD should be able to cope with 20,000 input transactions in a
period of one second. If the same SSD is said to be able to produce 20,000 4K
random read IOPS, then the same SSD should be able to produce 20,000 4K random
read output transactions in a one second interval.
Ok, now we have some figures to work with,
the next question is how many IOPS are actually required?
This will depend on your usage pattern. If
you are a typical desktop user who browses the internet, does some word
processing or perhaps some audio or video editing, and perhaps plays a few
games, then in actual fact, you don’t need to have massive 4K random read/write
performance. The actual amount of 4K random performance that is required for a
fast and smooth running system for a desktop user with a usage pattern similar
to the above will be well under 1,000 4K IOPS.
On the other hand, if the SSD is being used
for running a large and complex database server, then 4K random performance is
the absolute measurement of how fast that server will run, as this type of
application does most of its input and output transactions in the 4K domain.
So why would I need an SSD with 80,000 4K
IOPS for a desktop?
In fact you don’t need this type of
performance for a desktop, but an SSD which is capable of coping with 80,000 4K
IOPS will be faster than an SSD which can only cope with 20,000 4K IOPS.
OK, I just said if under 1,000 4K IOPS are
actually required for typical desktop usage, why is an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
faster than an SSD with only 20,000 4K IOPS, confused?
You may ask, if I only require 1,000 4K
IOPS surely the rest is wasted?
While you may never need 80,000 4K IOPS,
IOPS is all about latency. The reason that an SSD can cope with as much as 80,000
4K IOPS is because latency in this domain is very low. With 4K files, even if
you require to process 500 of them at the same time, you are not talking about
a huge amount of data, it has far more to do with how long it takes the SSD to
process a single file, and the amount of time required to process a single 4K
is all about how long it takes for the SSD to access or store that data before
it can move on to the next transaction.
In other words an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
performance will handle those 500 files faster than the SSD with 20,000 IOPS.
So how will a desktop user even notice this
faster speed if so little 4K random IOPS and data are actually used?
Multitasking is a good example. The more
tasks you run at the same time, you more you will notice the speed difference.
Sequential performance
I have always maintained that sequential
performance was every bit as important as small random file performance for a
desktop SSD. Some highly regarded people on other sites found this statement
quite funny a couple of years ago when I made it, but my, how times have
changed in the world of SSD reviewing.
To me this was always so obvious for a
desktop user. For example, let’s say you want to launch an application or game.
Both have some fairly large files to load, and also a great many small files,
but the point is, even the smaller files are sequential in nature. Now let’s
say you’re into audio or video editing. Video files tend to be huge, and the
files are written or read sequentially. Isn’t this how many users are using
their PCs these days?
Summary
So how does this shape up in the real
world? Which is better, massive 4K IOPS or massive sequential performance?
In an ideal world you want both, as an SSD
with massive random 4K IOPS and sequential performance will always be faster
than an SSD that has high sequential performance and moderate 4K random IOPS
performance, and the same applies to an SSD that has massive 4K random
performance and moderate sequential performance. The SSD which has high
performance in both patterns will always be the faster SSD.
However, you can still have an SSD that is
very fast for desktop use that has moderate random 4K performance and massive
sequential performance, the same can be said about a drive having massive
random 4K performance and moderate sequential performance, as it is about
getting the balance right if you have to compromise on one or the other.
Drive preparation for running the tests
All the SSDs used in this article were in a
clean and fresh state when the testing period started. From then on, each drive
had to rely on its own NAND cleaning effectiveness for the remainder of the
tests.
- Both our spinning HDD drives were
defragged before the start of each test.
- All SSD and HDD used in this article had
their partitions aligned to the Windows 7 x64 defaults.
Where I use graphs in this article to
display results, I will use the following colours to make it easier, for our
readers to see which drive we are reviewing.
ADATA
SP900 128GB SSD
Comparison
SSD
Comparison
HDD
Now let's head to the next page, where I
look at some basic benchmarks...
Reading Benchmarks
HD Tune
HD Tune – Sequential reading test
I present the graph below for comparison
with other recently tested drives.
A good performance from the ADATA SP900.
ATTO disk benchmark
ATTO has become a standard tool for
measuring the data throughput of HDD and SSD. It measures the performance of
reading and writing, using different file sizes and block sizes.
As expected, ATTO was able to show the
maximum performance that the ADATA SP900 can achieve.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
Crystal Disk Mark is quite a handy
benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a
problem on a system drive.
The default setting on CrystalDiskMark is
to use random data, and that gives a more realistic view on the performance of
any drive. The overall performance of the ADATA SP900 is good,
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmark is a benchmarking tool
specifically designed to test SSDs. The application tests sequential reading
and writing performance, 4K random reading and writing performance.
AS SSD benchmark also tests 4K threaded
performance. This is very exciting, as this test is the first available test
that I am aware of, that simulates how a PC operating system actually works. A
modern PC and OS, such as Windows Vista/7 does not just run a single thread at
a time, it runs many threads. The AS SSD benchmark "4K 64Thrd" tests
run 64 threads simultaneously throughout the test. If this result is good, then
you can be pretty sure the drive will perform extremely well as a system drive.
After the tests complete, AS SSD benchmark
derives a total score for the drive being tested. This is based on all aspects
of the test results, and gives an indication of how the drive is performing
overall.
Now let’s look at the results for the ADATA
SP900 128GB SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’
results are presented in the form of a graph.
In this test, the ADATA SP900 SSD is in the
middle, with an average score of 446MB/s.
Summary:
The ADATA SP900 SSD has good overall performance..
Let's head to the next page for our
IOMeter test results.....
I/O Performance
There is little point of having an SSD
drive that has blazing sustained reading and writing speeds, if the drive can't
handle reading and writing of small random files. If you intend to use your new
SSD drive to store and run your operating system, then the drive must be able
to cope with the many small random files that Windows will write to the drive
continually. So I feel it is very important to test how many of these random
files that a drive can handle in one second. I believe that anything over 1,000
I/O’s per second would be enough for most users running a consumer grade
mainstream PC, and should provide a smooth running system. But obviously, the
more I/O's that a drive can handle, the faster the drive will feel and leave
more headroom for those huge multitasking sessions that users sometimes engage
in.
The things that I will look at are the
total I/O per second and total MB/s.
Partition alignment and sector boundaries
Windows 7 and Vista will automatically
align a partition to 4k boundaries during partition creation, Windows XP won’t.
It is imperative that an SSD’s partition is aligned. Windows XP is also
restricted to sector boundaries, while Windows 7 will use 4k boundaries if it
can. The Intel 510 is 4k boundary aware, and will use these boundaries if
possible. Of course it will also remap LBAs for compatibility with the sector
boundaries so that the drive can be used with Windows XP.
IOMeter allows us to set the sector
boundaries for conducting the tests, and I have therefore set the sector
boundaries at 4K, which means the IOMeter tests are valid for Windows 7 and
Windows Vista users. XP users will not be able to obtain such results.
I will provide a screenshot of the tests on
the review drive for those of you who like to see the actual test result. All
the comparison drive results are represented in the form of graphs.
If any of you would like to see a
screenshot from any IOMeter test on a particular drive, please feel free to
request one, and I’ll post the screenshot in the forum thread.
All the IOMeter tests create a 10GB data
set on the target drive, and each test is run for a duration of 3 minutes.
IOMeter 4K random write test with repeating data.
The first test involves creating continual
4KB random files on the target drive with IOMeter. I use a 4KB file size, as it
is believed that Windows will create and modify many of this size of file
constantly in the background during a typical Windows session. It is said that
most 4K random writes take place at a queue depth of only one, and I have been requested
to include this test in my reviews.
Queue depth 1
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD – 4K random write (QD1)
The ADATA SP900 128GB SSD shows some impressive
performance, 68.49 MB/Sec.
Queue depth 4
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
The ADATA SP900 in this test gives a really
impressive performance. It’s the second fastest drive we tested, reaching
264.07MB/s.
Queue depth 32
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
Again in this test, the ADATA SP900 was the
second fastest drive tested.
IOMeter 4K random read test.
If there are many 4k files created, then
that must also mean that many 4k files need to be read. This test measures 4k
reading performance.
It is said that most 4K random reads take
place at a queue depth of only one, and readers have requested that I include
this test in my reviews.
Queue depth 1
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (Queue depth 1)
The ADATA SP900 shows poor performance in this
test. It reaches a speed of 22.49 MB/Sec.
Queue depth 4
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
The ADATA SP900 SSD is showing a poor
performance in this test.
Queue depth 32
ADATA SP900 GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
Again the performance of the ADATA SP900 is
only acceptable.
IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.
Sequential writing performance is also very
important; in this test sequential writing performance is measured.
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD 512K Sequential write with repeating data
500.56 MB/s is a very impressive result for
the ADATA SP900 SSD.
IOMeter 512KB read test.
This test measures 512k sequential reading
performance.
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD – 512K sequential reading test
Again the ADATA SP900 was able to demonstrate
a great result with sequential reading.
IOMeter Workstation simulation (outstanding I/Os = 64).
When running applications you will find
that there is a mixture of small random files and larger sequential files,
being created and read. Not only that, it isn’t just one file at a time. In
this test I measure a simulated workstation pattern, with a queue depth of 64
(threaded).
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD – Workstation simulation
The ADATA SP900 SSD is in the middle, and
it achieves speeds of 139.18MB/s.
Summary
The ADATA SP900 gives some very impressive
results when it comes to sequential data, however it struggles with random data.
The overall performance of the ADATA SP900 is good.
Now let’s head to the next page where we
will look at how the ADATA SP900 SSD performs using a brand new benchmarking
application....
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
As well as performing SSD endurance tests.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities has a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD
benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random
at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more importantly
than this, all using real test data.
Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD
benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test
data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied
from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few
data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an
application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real
application data being read and written to the SSD.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta
at the moment, but the application is currently solid enough to use in this
article, and I have already verified the results obtained using an SATA analyser.
I will include a screenshot of the review
drive, and all comparison results will be presented in the form of graphs. If
you would like to see screenshots of the test results obtained on the other
SSDs in this article, you can do so by following the link here.
I will also be testing three different
compression profiles, which are as follows.
- 0 fill (100% compressible data)
- Application simulation profile (46%
compressed) - 100% (non compressible data)
So let’s begin the tests.
0 fill
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (0 fill)
Total score
Writing score
Reading score
A very impressive result to start our tests
for the SP900 SSD.
Application profile
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (application profile)
Total score
Writing score
Reading score
As it was expected the performance drops
when we start to use uncompressed data.
100% incompressible
ADATA SP900 128GB SSD (100% incompressible)
Total score
Writing score
Read score
Again the ADATA SP900 continues to struggle
with incompressible data.
Summary
The performance of the ADATA SP900 SSD
again has two sides, one with compressible data, that simply shines, and the
other with incompressible data, where the drive shows some poor performance.
Now let's head to the next page for some
real world tests....
It has become clear that simply conducting
endless benchmarks on SSD drives is pointless. Real users may run a few
benchmarks when they first fit their SSD drive, but most users just want a
drive that performs well in the real world. They want their drive to work
"out of the box" and work fast and smoothly.
Most of the latest SSD drives can deliver
very fast sustained reading and writing speeds, but these alone tell you very
little about how the drive will perform in the real world.
If you intend to use your SSD as your
primary system drive, with an operating system and applications installed and
running from the drive, real world performance becomes much more important than
just fast sequential read and write speeds.
Real
world copy tests
I will now conduct a few real world copy
tests. In these tests I try to simulate what a real user does with their
drives. I will be coping some mp3 files, various picture files, and install MS
office.
I should point out that this is not a
scientific way of measuring performance. These timings were taken with a stop watch;
I have however ensured that the reading drive is well able to supply a data stream
to our writing drive, which is high enough not to be slowing down the
performance of the writing drive. The source drive will be the Crucial M4.
I will once again be comparing the obtained
results with our comparison drives, and will present the results in the form of
graphs.
Copy tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)
An acceptable result for the ADATA SP900
SSD.
Copy tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)
In this test the result is impressive.
Windows start-up and closedown
For these tests, I simply used a stop watch
and tested the amount of time taken for a full installation of Windows 7 to
boot to the desktop, and then timed how long it took for Windows 7 to close
down by the normal start menu method. From now I will also be adding the time
what Windows logs on the even viewer for start-up and shutdown.
The timing was started once the BIOS had
initialised and reached the “loading OS message”.
Windows 7 boot time
Windows 7 shutdown
Excellent result on the shutdown test but slightly
slower than the next drive that uses asynchronous NAND, again I am sure that in
daily use no one will notice the difference.
Event Viewer Logs
First Shutdown
The next two screen shots were taken after I'd
installed all the drivers and all the software that I use every day. Below are
the results.
Used
state boot time.
Used
state shutdown
In the log that the event viewer holds, we
can get a better idea of how much time it takes for the drive to boot and
shutdown.
Installing applications
Installing applications is possibly
something you don't do that often. But should you replace your system disk,
then you will most likely have to re-install your applications. Most of the SSD
drives I have tested up until now are quite slow at installing applications,
most likely because their I/O performance was quite limited.
For these tests, we picked some popular
applications and copied the entire contents of the CD or DVD media to an Crucial
M4 256GB SSD. We did this to make sure that the reading speed of our CD/DVD
reader would not hamper the performance of the target drive.
We then installed these applications onto
our comparison HDD drives, which were all running mirror image installations of
our Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installation, and timed the amount of time
taken to install the application with a stopwatch on each of the drives.
MS Office 2007 Professional (full install)
Now let’s see
how the ADATA SP900 SSD performs with the installation of MS Office 2007
Enterprise Edition.
The procedure
followed was very simple, I copied all the files from the CD to the Crucial M4
SSD and the Crucial M4 was used as a source drive for the installation of MS
Office 2007.
This
is an excellent result.
Speed degradation after heavy testing
On this page I will test how the SSD
performs after heavy testing and usage.
I will run an AS SSD benchmark test when
the OS if freshly installed so that we can get a good view on how the drive
performs with the OS. after that I will fill the drive up to 50% of its capacity
and use the drive for a few days, and then re-run the AS SSD benchmark. The
same procedure will be followed once again, but this time the drive will be
filled close to 90% of its capacity, and to finish this test, I will simply
delete all the extra data and leave the PC idle for a few hours so that the
controller has the time to perform any necessary cleaning and see how the drive
will perform.
First run with the OS
With
the drive filled 50%
Now
the performance when the drive is 90% full
And
finally the drive with only the OS and some everyday applications.
After a week with everyday use I would say
that the drive clearly shows some good performance, not only in respect of the numbers,
but also with regard to restoring the drive to its original performance. The
only negative is the asynchronous NAND that slows down the performance, but
that’s something to expect from a drive that is not aiming for the enthusiast
market.
This concludes our review. To read the final
thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....
Final thoughts and the conclusion
To sum up, this is
what I would say:
The ADATA SP900 has shown that the daily
performance of an SSD is far away from any mechanical solution, but is this
enough? The answer isn’t simply a 'YES' or 'NO', it’s more complicated. It has
to do with your needsand how much you are willing to spend on an SSD.
ADATA’s SP900 from the beginning gave me
the impression that it’s mainly aimed at the daily PC user, and in that regard
it gives very good performance. A generally fast drive, that can easily be an
“unbeatable upgrade” especially if you are moving from a mechanical HDD, or a
first generation SSD. The trim performance is also one more positive and the
drive can recover very quickly from a used state back to close to new.
There are a couple of negatives, and the
first one is the asynchronous NAND, but that’s something that is expected from
a drive that is not aimed at enthusiasts. The other is the price, and what do I
mean by that? By the time I was finishing this review I wasn’t able to find a
price for the drive. Therefore I can simply hope that ADATA price this
aggressively, because the competition out there is very tough.
Conclusion:
Let us summarise the most important positive
and negative points below:
Positive:
- Excellent operation as a system drive.
- Excellent sequential read/write speeds on
sequential data - Access times.
- SATA 6Gbps support.
- Good TRIM performance.
- Fast operating system shutdown times.
- 3 year warranty.
- Extra capacity
Negative:
- Asynchronous NAND.
The parting sentence is:
“The general good performance of the
drive and the extra capacity that it offers are some things that you can’t ignore.
As I've said, this drive has the potential to be an 'unbeatable upgrade' for
your home or work system, but only if it follows a good pricing policy.”
I therefore give the 'Very Good' rating to
the ADATA SP900 SSD.
Thanks to:
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EFD |
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Alex Schepeljanski for |
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You may comment on this review below.
