Product review: ADATA USA SP550 480GB 2.5" Sata_6_0_gb III Solid State Drive 480.0

I own a couple of SSD drives and always run the same tests on each new ssd so I can compare their performance. The ADATA has an excellent READ speed performance and fairly good WRITE speed performance. There are more expensive SSDs available that have write speeds that are about 15% faster than this one, however in real world use such small differences in write speeds have no impact on system performance.

I tested the ADATA SP550 SSD on an Intel iCore 7 Haswell system running Fedora 23 with 32G of memory. The Adata SP550 SSD has read speeds that are limited only by the SATA 3 interface (excellent results). It has good but not industry leading write speeds. The manufacturer specifies read speeds of 530 Mbytes/second and write speeds of 480 MBytes/second which I confirmed using two bench marking tools, Gnome Disks and Sys_basher.

I took three sets of measurements with Gnome Disks, a set with a 1 MByte sample size, a set with a 10 MByte sample size and a set with a 100 MByte sample size.

Average Read
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 Mbyte sample:______407.5 MBytes/second
10 MByte sample:_____525.5 MBytes/second
100 MByte sample:____534.5 MBytes/second

Average Write
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 Mbyte sample:______230.2 MBytes/second
10 MByte sample:_____359.4 MBytes/second
100 MByte sample:____433.5 MBytes/second

Average Access (latency)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 MByte sample:______0.13ms
10 MByte sample:_____0.13ms
100 MByte sample:____0.15ms

Another interesting measurement is to measure transfer rates for different file sizes. At small file sizes (less than 256K) the overhead of the operating system has a large impact, as file sizes grow larger the SSD approaches it's maximum transfer rates. Because of the limitations of the SATA 3 bus no SSD has faster read transfers than the ADATA SSD.

' Read performance
Size__________Transfer Rate
KWords___________MBytes/Sec
4__________________21.56
16_________________64.00
64_________________143.09
256________________344.93
1024_______________465.83
4096_______________512.31
16384______________530.49
65536______________545.45

' Write performance
Size__________Transfer Rate
KWords___________MBytes/Sec
4__________________2.42
16_________________10.13
64_________________40.18
256________________100.44
1024_______________191.49
4096_______________254.52
16384______________409.05
65536______________443.47

I am using this SSD drive for SSD caching using DM-CACHE which is part of Linux logical volume manager. This is a perfect use for SSD because the write do not go to SSD when the files are created, they only go to SSD after a read occurs, which means it is used only for files that I am actually using to make access to them faster. I am seeing a noticable speed up in i/o operations

Overall, this is an excellent SSD drive and my tests confirm the benchmarks provided by manufacturer.

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Ali Julia review ★★★★★