Adata - Xpg Sx8200 Pro 1tb M2-2280 Solid State Drive Review

Best of the year 2019 Bug Information technology's a rare thing to find a solid-state drive (SSD), whether Chiliad.2 or Series ATA, that truly stands out from the pack these days. As drive makers take gotten meliorate and better at manufacturing storage devices that are faster and more reliable than ever, the gap in price and performance between the bottom tier and loftier cease of the SSD spectrum has narrowed from a canyon to a crevice. That'southward why it'southward nice when drives like the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro come along. This PCI Limited NVMe M.2 drive ($259.99 MSRP for the 1TB version we tested, though the street price is significantly lower) shows in that location's still a bit of room at the top to showcase blazingly quick speeds that push the interface to its limits, at prices that won't make your wallet weep. It's a strong choice in a competitive class dominated at the moment by Samsung and WD.

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Since When Do Thousand.2 SSDs Wait Slick?

Because the XPG SX8200 Pro is a Blazon-2280 M.two SSD, using the PCI Express 3.0 interface, you'll need to check that your system supports 80mm-long SSDs using the PCI Limited bus and the NVMe information-transfer protocol. (If you're shaky on what we mean by all this, read our deep-dive primers on the best G.two SSDs and the best PCI Express NVMe SSDs.)

Though the XPG SX8200 Pro doesn't look similar much straight out of the box, the choice to add on a sleek matte-black-and-red rut spreader did add together to the cool cistron a scrap (no pun intended). That said, our storage testbed has a removable heatsink that hides the entire drive from view when information technology'southward in place. So the aesthetic of the drive may or may not affair in your PC build, depending on your specific motherboard, whether it has heat-dissipation gear over the M.2 slot(due south), and whether the inside of your PC is visible at all. In our test machine, it didn't matter much.

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XPG SX8200 Pro-2

Earlier nosotros talk about the pricing of the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, information technology's helpful to go a picture of what's been happening in the flash-storage marketplace every bit a whole over the past year. For starters, the SX8200 Pro is based on 3D TLC NAND, a depression-cost blazon of flash memory now widely used in SSDs. (For more than on TLC and other esoteric SSD terms, bank check out our SSD lingo dejargonizer.) Though prices for drives of this kind rose steadily during 2016 and 2017 due to increasing demand from enterprise companies, by the 2nd one-half of 2018, the market establish itself with a overabundance of overproduction. This has led to a sharp subtract in cost for SSDs of all stripes across the board. That explains why the MSRP for the 1TB version of the XPG SX8200 Pro being tested here is $259.99 (set when information technology was released concluding autumn), simply yous can currently discover the drive on Amazon and from other resellers for just $149.99.

Capacities and Costs

This price sway brings the toll per gigabyte of the 1TB version of the drive downwardly from 26 cents to roughly 15 cents in merely under half a year of being on shelves, which equates to some serious savings no thing how you slice it. The drive is also rated for 640 terabytes written (TBW) of write-endurance and comes with a 5-year warranty, both of which are above the average for a like-priced 1TB consumer M.two bulldoze these days.

ADATA offers the SX8200 Pro in ii additional capacities. The 512GB version of the bulldoze is selling for $99.99, and the 256GB version is going for $59.99, which equates to nineteen and 23 cents per gigabyte, respectively. This makes the 1TB version of the SX8200 Pro the all-time value by a slim margin over the 512GB variant, and a much meliorate one than the 256GB.

As for durability ratings, the 512GB features a rating of 320TBW, while the 256GB features a rating of 160TBW, all lower by proportion to the 1TB capacity. Again, these numbers are all slightly above the average in this class, which boosts the value proposition that the SX8200 Pro line offers.

XPG SX8200 Pro-3

The XPG SX8200 Pro uses the aforementioned SSD ToolBox utility to manage your data that all of the company's consumer SSDs rely on. It lets you update firmware, securely erase the bulldoze, optimize using the TRIM service (if the Bone doesn't handle that), run diagnostics, and more than. It isn't spectacular, only it is functional enough.

The XPG on the M.2 Racetrack

At the moment, the 1TB version of the WD Black NVMe SSD has topped most tests and been among the fastest consumer-minded M.2 PCI Express SSDs that PC Labs has tested in the by few years. Given that, at this writing, this WD drive hovers just around the same toll per gigabyte in this chapters every bit the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro (22 cents per gigabyte, versus 21 cents), we'll compare the ii directly, along with two other recent PCI Limited 1000.2 drives PC Labs is testing in parallel with this 1, from Kingston and Mushkin.

First up is PCMark viii's Storage test, which simulates everyday disk accesses in tasks such as editing photos and web browsing. The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro takes a micro-lead hither amidst this examination group, really within the margin of error...

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro PCMark 8

This isn't surprising; generally speaking, the amount of variation in this test with PCI Limited drives is so small that it doesn't behave mentioning.

In our Crystal DiskMark Sequential Q32T1 read and write tests, the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro held its own confronting the WD Black NVMe, with essential ties on both tests. (The Crystal DiskMark Sequential tests simulate best-instance, straight-line transfers of big files.)

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro Crystal DiskMark Sequential

In dissimilarity, the 4K (or "random" read/write) tests simulate typical processes involved in programme/game loads or bootup sequences. Things went more in the WD Black's favor here. Read results, again, were a gold star for the ADATA, just on 4K writes the WD Black pulled well alee, scoring 247MBps to the XPG SX8200 Pro'southward 162MBps consequence.

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro Crystal DiskMark 4K

Terminal up is a serial of file and folder transfers done using the AS-SSD benchmarking utility. In these tests, large files (here, a big ISO) or folders (containing typical game and plan files) are copied by the AS-SSD utility from one location on the test drive to another.

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro AS-SSD

Here, the XPG SX8200 Pro posted some of the consistently highest results that PC Labs has seen at this price signal from any M.2 PCI Express drive tested to date, the WD Black included. Every test in this series of three showed strong results.

Wrapping Up: A Solid-Value M.ii

The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro provides rapid speeds at a price point that keeps it competitive with nigh other Thou.ii PCI Express drives in its class. The drive has benefitted highly from the recent drop in SSD costs, and the value shines through in all of the benchmarks we ran. We still give the WD Black the border for performance-minded folks, but it's a close race here in a fast-maturing market of PCI Express M.2 SSDs. If yous're someone who's on the hunt for a faster-than-boilerplate drive at a lower-than-boilerplate toll, wait no farther than the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro.