ADATA XPG SX930 240GB SSD Review

[section label=”Introduction”]

Its been a while since we last took a look at ADATA’s SSD offerings especially their XPG line of gaming and enthusiast products. ADATA did show a couple of new products over at Computex 2015 and we have the newly released ADATA XPG SX930 in the lab for review right now to show you what’s up with the new SSD offerings from ADATA’s XPG line up.

The new ADATA XPG SX930 still comes in 2.5″ SSD form factor with SATAIII support and is aimed at, as mentioned, gamers and enthusiasts. Under the hood are what ADATA refers to as Enterprise-grade MLC Plus NAND flash which are basically cherry-picked chips to support ADATA’s intention of giving the SX930 a really solid 5-year warranty. The XPG SX930 also boasts ADATA’s pSLC Cache Technology and a DDR3 DRAM cache for faster access amongst other technology. We’ll take a closer look at how the new XPG SX930 performs in this review. Read on!

Specifications

Closer Look

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that ADATA has dropped their hummingbird design and traded it for a flame pattern. This is to jive with the whole aggressive feel that gamers usually go for and the overall packaging signifies that. Inside the package is a humble bundle of a spacer, a 3.5mm bracket, screws and some documentation along with, of course, the ADATA XPG SX930. In terms of presentation, there’s really nothing new to the XPG SX930 as it still bears ADATA’s signature brushed metal body in the 2.5″ form factor.

PERFORMANCE TESTING

Test Setup

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K
Motherboard: MSI Z77 Mpower
Memory: Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-2400 16GB
Storage: ADATA XPG SX930 SSD 240GB
PSU: Seasonic Platinum P1000

Potential Performance

ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.

Potential Write Performance

For potential write testing, HD Tune was used to measure the drive’s write performance. Again, we focus on the average results for real-world relevance.

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo” of Japan, and is available for free. Crystal Disk Mark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.

Real-world Test: File Transfer

We’ve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,343 files for 3GB and a single, large 12GB file. We’re posting the raw transfer results for your reference. Test data is copied off a PCI-express SSD.

Conclusion

The ADATA XPG SX930 showcases some very good performance figures all across our benchmarks and while it may not be anything revolutionary, we’ve always noted that we’ve reached the point in time where many SSDs are saturating the SATAIII connectivity and this is the main reason we will soon be adopting interfaces for our storage. With many options out there vying for the standards and mainstream acceptance crowd, its still without a doubt that SATAIII is still the de-facto standard and won’t go away anytime soon. That said, ADATA’s choice to stick with the SATAIII for their XPG SX930 is a good call and without any other models branching out, the company can focus development on this one product.

While performance for SATA SSDs have pretty much leveled over the past year and many products are delivering 500MB/s or more for reads and decent write performance, its the price that’s really interesting to see change for these products. The ADATA XPG SX930 is estimated to retail for around $110 for the 240GB model, as this is a key capacity point, we’ll focus on this one. The ADATA XPG SX930 is priced just a bit lower than higher-specced competing products which makes it a more accessible high-performance option than opting to go for mainstream or entry-level SSDs. ADATA also adds a 5-year warranty to make it a more enticing offer.

Overall, if you’re looking for a new SSD the ADATA XPG SX930 is a good choice if you’re specifically not looking to spend any more than its estimated price. Its definitely not an upgrade if you have an SSD from the last year or so but at its price point, its a good option than buying a brand new high-end SSD that would probably be outdated in a few months time. The ADATA XPG SX930 sits in a good spot of value and performance balance. Its got solid read and write performance and features caching technology that some brands holds a premium over for. Definitely worth considering especially if you’re on a budget.

ADATA backs the XPG SX930 with a 5-year warranty. We give it our B2G Recommended Award!