Premier Pro SP920 256GB
ADATA
www.adata-group.com
Continuing its assault on the SSD market, ADATA has come out guns blazing with a brand-new lineup of drives. The Premier Pro SP920 family of 6Gbps SATA SSDs has a little something for everyone, in terms of capacity. Maybe you want a fleet-footed boot drive and nothing more. Perhaps the kinds of files you want to store on your new SSD is “all of them.” With capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and big ol’ 1TB, the Premier Pro SP920 family has you covered. We split the difference and called the 256GB model into the station for questioning.
The 256GB SP920 certainly has an impressive rap sheet. Previous ADATA SSDs relied on SandForce silicon for their storage controllers, but the controller under the hood of the SP920 is Marvell’s 88SS9189. Like the SSD itself, this controller is new, shiny, and laden with tasty treats. We know you care deeply about performance, and the Marvell 88SS9189 has plenty. Sequential reads and writes peak at 560MBps and 360MBps, respectively, while random 4K reads and writes can top out at an obscene 96,000 IOPS/80,000 IOPS.
Better still, our test results showed that it makes no difference to this controller whether a particular workload is com- pressible or not.
Marvell’s controller also gives you NCQ, TRIM, and S.M.A.R.T. support, as it should, and it also has a hardware- based AES-256 encryption engine.
ADATA fills this drive with synchronous MLC NAND, set up in eight channels.
Although the SP920 is a slender 7mm thick, ADATA includes a spacer to fatten it up for 9.5mm bays. And because we’re all special little snowflakes, ADATA gifts every SP920 with a product key for Acronis True Image HD. (We found ours under the drive itself.) As our benchmark results show, the SP920 is a burner. What it won’t do, though, is burn up your budget; you can have the 256GB drive for about 62 cents a gig. That’s hot.
Benchmark Results
ADATA
Premier Pro
SP920 256GB
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3
(64-bit, default)*
Sequential read 498
Sequential write 361
512K read 462
512K write 360.3
4K read 29.6
4K write 130
4K QD32 read 394.6
4K QD32 write 333.5
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3
(64-bit, all 0x00, 0 fill)*
Sequential read 502.3
Sequential write 361.5
512K read 460.8
512K write 360.1
4K read 29.97
4K write 130.1
4K QD32 read 396.1
4K QD32 write 333.3
AS-SSD*
Seq read 504.82
Seq write 342.67
4K read 25.15
4K write 112.61
4K-64Thrd read 371.29
4K-64Thrd write 266.42
*MBps
Specs: Sequential read/write (advertised): 560MBps/360MBps; Max 4K random read/write (advertised, Iometer): 96,000 IOPS/80,000 IOPS; Interface:
6Gbps SATA; Warranty: 3 years
Test system specs: Intel Core i7-4770K; Motherboard: ASUS MAXIMUS VI FORMULA; GPU: ASUS ROG POSEIDON-GTX780-P-3GD5; RAM: 8GB ADATA XPG
V2 DDR3-2400; Storage: 128GB Crucial RealSSD C300; OS: Windows 8 Enterprise (64-bit)