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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
Like the Intel 600p, the ADATA XPG GAMMIX S10 has a substantial performance advantage over all SATA SSDs on the Light test when the test is run on an empty drive. But when the drive is full, the GAMMIX S10 and Intel 600p both suffer more than most drives and fall to an average data rate that is lower than most mainstream SATA drives.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores of the GAMMIX S10 on the Light test are clearly better than the Intel 600p, allowing the GAMMIX S10 to deliver latencies that are no worse than mainstream SATA SSDs even in the worst case of the test running on a full drive. On a freshly erased drive, the GAMMIX S10 offers average latency that is close to other NVMe drives, and the 99th percentile latency is on par with other budget NVMe SSDs.
Average read and write latencies for the GAMMIX S10 on the Light test are poor by NVMe standards, but both are better than SATA SSDs when the drive is fresh, and no worse than mainstream SATA when the drive is full.
The 99th percentile read latency performance of the GAMMIX S10 is fine for a low-end NVMe drive. On the write side of things the GAMMIX S10 does fine when freshly erased, but the 99th percentile jumps up by a factor of ten when the drive is full. This makes it worse at controlling latency outliers than any mainstream SATA SSD.
The energy usage of the GAMMIX S10 on the Light test is good compared to most other NVMe SSDs, though the energy usage is much higher when the drive is full. There's still a substantial gap between the energy usage of a typical SATA SSD and that of the GAMMIX S10 or a typical NVMe 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.