Question Adata SX8100 512GB

[Hans Gruber]

I needed something cheap. My B350 is going to be passed onto family members who are not worthy once Zen3 is released. I would have liked the SX8200pro but I could not justify the extra $15-20 for it. Now I have dual 500GB Samsung 850evo's that will go into the new build.

I found the Harry Potter version of Shizuku edition.

Thoughts on this Adata NVMe 1.3 drive? It came with a DIY heatsink. Basically it was $60 +tax. Are these acceptable speeds?

 

[NewMaxx]

The write speeds are within SLC (TLC in single-bit mode) and you can predict results with some accuracy, MB/s will be interleaving multiplied by the # of programs per second times the page size in MB. e.g. 32-way interleaving (8-channel controller, 2 dies per channel, 2 planes per die) times 1/SLC program time (218µs) times 0.015625 (16KiB in MiB) equals 2294 MB/s. Reads don't matter because you'll max out even at 250GB with queue depth to the maximum of x4 PCIe 3.0 which is given by lanes times bandwidth per lane times encoding times overhead: (4)(1024)(128/130)(.9) = ~3630 MB/s.

The rest you just match up to review or whatever, and they do seem correct. Be aware that write speeds outside SLC will be a lot slower, given a TLC program time of 1000µs it's more like 500 MB/s and due to the large cache it can get stuck in folding which would be about half that, given long enough writes at speed, although I haven't tested it myself.

 

[alexruiz]

It is a very fast drive, but older firmware versions have an annoying bug with power management:

They work fine, they are stable when in use, but once in a while the BIOS doesn't see them when the PC is turned on.
Doesn't happen all the time, but when it does you need to turn the PC off and on one or 2 times to make the BIOS see the drive.

I am speculating that the implementation of one of the nvme protocol power states is broken.

I say go for it, specially being a desktop PC.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I knew I wanted something better than the Intel 660P and some of those junk QLC drives as well as a few TLC drives. I notice the system is snappier but most people would not notice a difference. Transferring large files is very noticeable. I use it as my boot drive and for X-plane 11 because of the large files. It's faster but not night and day loading games. The Samsung 850 EVO's are about as fast as a standard SATA 3 SSD gets.

The advice on NVMe's has always been to get something small and use it as a boot drive.