The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The ADATA SX6000 Pro is a bit slower overall on The Destroyer than the Mushkin Helix-L, but is basically tied with the Toshiba BG4, so it's in the right ballpark for an entry level NVMe drive. The performance is much higher than the SATA drives or the QLC-based Intel 660p.

The SX6000 Pro's average and 99th percentile latency scores on The Destroyer are both clearly better than the other entry-level NVMe SSDs in this batch, and are not far behind some of the more affordable high-end drives.

The Toshiba BG4 and Mushkin Helix-L both have moderately better average read latency scores than the SX6000 Pro, but the latter is way ahead when it comes to writes—the SX6000 Pro's average write latency is competitive with several high-end NVMe drives.

The 99th percentile read latency score for the SX6000 Pro isn't as good as most of the other NVMe drives, but it's still clearly better than the SATA drives or the QLC-based Intel 660p. For writes, the 99th percentile latency can't match the top-tier high-end drives but it is competitive with the high-end drives based on the SM2262EN controller that takes a similarly aggressive approach to SLC caching as the Realtek RTS5763DL.

Several of the entry-level NVMe drives we've tested score very well for efficiency over the course of The Destroyer thanks to a combination of decent performance and power savings from the lack of onboard DRAM. This is clearly not the case for the SX6000 Pro. It does use less energy in total than the most power-hungry high-end drives, but the Toshiba BG4 and Mushkin Helix-L both complete the test with comparable overall performance while using less than half as much energy.