The ADATA XPG GAMMIX S10 (512GB) SSD Review: Entry-Level NVMe With Style
by Billy Tallis on October 25, 2017 8:30 AM ESTAnandTech 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 XPG GAMMIX S10 delivers an average data rate on The Destroyer that is essentially tied with the Intel 600p. This performance falls within the range of mainstream SATA SSDs, while most other TLC-based NVMe SSDs can at least outperform SATA SSDs.
The average latency of the GAMMIX S10 on The Destroyer is substantially better than the Intel 600p, while its 99th percentile latency is only slightly improved over the 600p. On both metrics, the GAMMIX S10 still rates worse than many mainstream SATA SSDs.
The average read latency of the GAMMIX S10 on The Destroyer is better than any SATA SSD and better than the Intel 600p. The average write latency is a significant improvement over the 600p but is otherwise still quite bad, with latency twice as high as typical mainstream SATA SSDs.
The 99th percentile read latency of the GAMMIX S10 is great, but not quite fast enough to place it in the very top tier of drives along Samsung and Toshiba. The 99th percentile write latency ranks at the other end of the field, worse than most mainstream SATA SSDs, though trailing by a less embarrassing margin than the Intel 600p.
The energy usage of the ADATA XPG GAMMIX S10 on The Destroyer is typical for NVMe SSDs. It's a bit more efficient than the Intel 600p or WD Black, but still uses twice as much energy as a good SATA SSD.
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Flunk - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Even a proper heatspreader doesn't cool the underlying components, to do that you need fins to dissipate heat. Add fins to a heatspreader then you have a heatsink. I'm not saying heatspeaders are worthless, but they don't do much unless attached to something else.ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
The heatspreader will work, if it has good contact with the chip, which it doesn't.The purpose of the heat spreader is ... well... to spread heat. This gives you more surface to displace heat. Fins serve to increase the head-spreading effect further, although for this product in particular I doubt fins are necessary. In fact, as I mentioned above, the way the heatspreader is implemented and the pathetic performance itself suggest that the cooling solution is 100% unneeded, and present purely for cosmetic purposes.
znd125 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Information on the die/channel configuration is lacking in many SSD reviews by Billy Tallis. This information is especially important for SSDs using non-power-of-2 density NAND chips, which often result in awkward die/channel configurations that consequently lead to low performance. Tallis rarely discusses this.It is not enough to simply state "... severely reduced performance potential due to not being able to populate every channel of the controller with NAND flash chips". I expect more from AT articles. If not every, how many channels are populated? How many dies are in each channel? Are they evenly distributed? Tell us exactly how the channels are populated and then you can go on to judge whether that is good or bad.
As another example, Tom's Hardware in their Intel 600p review pointed out the drive was able to use only 6 of the 8 channels. Tallis did not. To me, that is not a trivial piece of information. That is THE reason the 600p does not reach its "performance potential" IMO.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
While I too would be interested to see the information you are seeking, I don't think its a critical flaw in the article. For those interested in making a buying decision, its the performance scores and the price and the price/performance equation that matter. Other information is useful if you want to know why one performs better than another. However, with nearly all SSD reviews these days, I usually end up just skimming through to the conclusion. If its a SATA drive, all I really want to know is where is its price/performance ration vs a Samsung 850 EVO. If its NVMe then the price/performance comparison is against the 960 EVO.However....here is something I really would like to see more of. When drives are tested I would like to see the same drive tested in different sizes...which is kind of getting into what you are talking about indirectly. For example, in all the charts you can see a pretty substantial difference between the 1TB and 250 GB 960 EVO's. It really would be nice to see a 512 GB in there. A drive that wins at 1 TB may not win at 512 GB. Unfortunately when I was buying the 512 is what was in my price range and I had to do some digging for information on that. THG actually did review all three sizes.
DanNeely - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Assuming the conclusion is right about next year's controllers being massively better than the current generation they can't get here soon enough. None of the controllers currently available to the down market OEMs are remotely competitive with samsung's last few generations of parts.MrSpadge - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Adatas strategy seems to be: make many bad SSDs with fancy names and hope someones buys them by accident. Otherwise I can't explain this and the preceeding drives.