ADATA Premier Pro SP910 Review

Solid-state drives or SSDs have now managed to make themselves more mainstream despite of the apparent high cost:capacity ratio that they may entail. Truth be told though, SSD technology has been progressing at such a pace, its almosts poetry that the industry is as fast as their products. Flash storage companies have been at the forefront of this industry and one of these companies is ADATA and today we have one of the newly released SSDs from the company bearing the Marvell 88SS9187, an older generation controller that is a clear sign that this drive is targeting the budget segment of the market.

For this review we’ll take a closer look at the ADATA Premiere Pro SP910. This SSD is targeted towards power-users and professionals looking to boost their productivity with faster storage. The SP910 is rated for 540MB/s read and 460MB/s. Now, hold up… did I just say 460MB/s write performance? Yessir. These SSDs are for upgraders looking for an SSD upgrade and aren’t intended for high-performance applications. We have the 256GB model in our lab so let’s check out the specs and move on with our ADATA Premiere Pro SP910 review:

Closer Look – ADATA Premier Pro SP910

ADATA packages their Premier Pro line-up in holographic box in contrast to their mainstream white. The box has a clear window showcasing the SSD inside. Details of the drive are highlighted in the back.

Inside the package we have nice starter kit bundle which includes a 3.5″ tray, an 9mm brace and documentations that includes a guide to download a free cloning software.

The ADATA Premier Pro SP910 is clad in a dark aluminium body with a brushed metal texture. The 7mm thick body is intended for low-footprint devices such as thin notebooks but can easily be mounted on average tower cases via the 3.5″ tray.

PERFORMANCE

Test Setup

Processor: Intel Core i7 4770K
Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z97X-GAMING-G1 WIFI BK Black Edition
Memory: Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-2400
Storage: ADATA Premier Pro SP910
PSU: Seasonic Platinum 1000w

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

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[tab title=”Maximum Write”]

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.

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[tab title=”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.

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[tab title=”AS SSD”]

AS SSD is a benchmark tool that determines the performance of Solid State Drives but can also be used to measure hard drives, it just takes longer. The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests .

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[tab title=”File Transfer”]

We’ve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,310 files for 3.34GB.

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CONCLUSION

Let’s break down the score before we give the final verdict.

Performance. Those used to SSDs with higher write performance wouldn’t bat an eyelash on the SP910 and that’s perfectly fine as they are not the target of this product. With decent read performance, this is the perfect primary drive for those on a laptop or a budget build with only a few applications running. The small file performance also gives it better flexibility as a primary drive so its got plenty of creds going for it for average consumers.

Build Quality. ADATA has shifted its SSDs to 7mm bringing down size and of course the same goes for the internal components of the SSD. Whilst the tin can feel of the main body feels cheap, the overall performance shows just how good ADATA is with their stuff.

Functionality. The ADATA Premier Pro SP910 is a good all-rounder but with an overall focus on being a consumer drive. The write performance may be a bit low for some but if you’re doing that much write on the drive then SSDs might not be your best choice unless your intending to use it as a disposable scratch disk.

Bundle. A far better bundle than what we saw on the Crucial M550 with ADATA providing a 9mm bracket, a 3.5″ mounting tray and a free cloning software for easy data migration.

Value. The ADATA Premier Pro SP910 isn’t currently available in the global market but going by the price of the equally sized but upper-market targeted SP920, we can expect these models to retail for a lower price. Currently, the Premier Pro SP920 256GB goes for $139 so we can assume the SP910 would have a lower price tag putting it at a very competitive spot. UPDATE: We’ve received the actual MSRP for PH for the ADATA Premier Pro SP910, and we’re proud to say our estimates are right in the spot which keeps our opinion the same.

With no price to go by, we cannot give a full verdict for this product but going with our estimate, we can safely assume that the ADATA Premier Pro SP910 is intended for the value-minded consumer and by that, it is a competitive product. The performance isn’t stunning by modern standards but as it is, the ADATA Premier Pro SP910 churns out very good numbers.

All in all, if you’re the kind of person that could benefit from faster storage but have no idea what to expect from an SSD upgrade or you’re looking at an SSD but is holding out because of budget constraints, then the ADATA Premier Pro SP910 should be worth looking it. As the drive is available on select markets as of this writing, we will update this review with pricing when it becomes available.

The ADATA Premier Pro SP910 is backed by a 3-year warranty. We give the ADATA Premier Pro SP910 our B2G Recommended Award.