The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution
by Billy Tallis on December 18, 2019 12:30 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The ADATA SX6000 Pro has decent overall performance on the Heavy test for an entry-level NVMe SSD, and its full-drive performance is the best for this market segment. The Mushkin Helix-L and Intel 660p both use Silicon Motion controllers that offer better peak performance for the empty-drive test runs at the expense of worse full-drive performance (even the high-end SMI-based drives are a bit slower when full than the SX6000 Pro).
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the SX6000 Pro are fine: all significantly faster than a mainstream SATA drive, with no huge latency spikes from running the test on a full drive.
The average latencies from the SX6000 Pro are higher than most NVMe SSDs but still better than SATA. For writes, the SX6000 Pro gets close to some high-end NVMe drives.
The 99th percentile read latency is the first sign that the SX6000 Pro has some difficulty with handling the Heavy test on a full drive, but the read QoS in that case is still better than the SATA drives. The 99th percentile write latencies are good whether the test is run on a full or empty drive.
The efficiency scores for the SX6000 Pro are in line with most high-end NVMe SSDs, but the other DRAMless NVMe drives again use half the energy to provide similar performance.
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otonieru - Sunday, May 10, 2020 - link
Well, there's this scenario where in some region in the world, HP ssd is simply nonexistent in market, and when they do, the price is wayy higher compared to original price. So... ?rocky12345 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
So basically if you just want more ssd storage that is more cost effective then go for one of these dram less drives. If you care about performance and don't mind a bit of a extra cost then pick up a drive with a decent dram cache.My own personal wants/needs require a drive with a DRAM cache and any of these drives with the realtek chipset and any other one with no dram cache support is a huge no go for me.
NewMaxx - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Thank you for the review.Some reviewers have speculated that these newer Realtek controllers are using MLC rather than SLC mode. Your results to some degree support this conjecture. I personally did not expect to see that on a TLC drive, but what are your thoughts on the subject?
NewMaxx - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
I'd like to add that I'm not supporting that viewpoint - full-drive SLC is in-line with ADATA's design principles on drives like this and the SU750 - but I'm curious about your take on those other reviews.Billy Tallis - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
The official spec sheet from ADATA says SLC caching, but I doubt those are actually written by people who would know better if it was MLC caching. The MLC caching hypothesis definitely explains why the cache is slower than usual for an SLC cache, and probably also why the folding process seems to be so slow. I'm not sure if it explains why the full-drive ATSB runs do comparatively well, and I'm still puzzled about the apparent lack of effect from HMB.NewMaxx - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
Thank you for the reply. It'll be interesting to compare this to the RTS5762 drives.TheWereCat - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
It's only 10€ cheaper than SX8200 Pro where I live.127€ vs 137€ for 1TB.
LMonty - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Good thing I saw this review before buying one for my laptop! Battery life would have been impacted.The_Assimilator - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Simple maxim in the PC space: if you see "Realtek", avoid.crimson117 - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Good luck buying a motherboard.