ADATA GAMMIX S10 512GB SSD Review: Affordable M.2 NVMe Performance

Benchmark Programs

Futuremark PCMark 08: Normal settings are used including the default setting of three runs. This gives us an extended test that takes roughly 45 minutes to complete, resulting in a sustained load that will thermally challenge drives. The free (demo) version is available on Steam for general use.

AS SSD: This handy little utility was custom-written for solid-state drives. We selected this program as by default it utilizes incompressible data and bypasses the Windows cache. This is another free program anyone can use to quickly test or verify normal performance of an SSD, available here.

ATTO: The bar graphs generated by this utility provide a huge amount of data in a condensed format. It is extremely handy for detecting problematic file sizes, performance bottlenecks, or simply inconsistent performance that can be hidden when viewing final performance averages. Though this is significantly less of a problem today as solid-state drives have matured, it remains an essential performance verification tool of any benchmark kit.

RoboCopy: This is Windows’ command-line utility included in most versions of Windows and provides for features beyond the default file copy handling of Windows Explorer. More information is available here. Windows Defender is also disabled to prevent bottlenecking the folder copy. We utilize a 9.81GB Movie file, and separately a 1.6GB Folder with 11,511 files across 449 subfolders and measure the performance to copying the data to and from a RAMdrive.

RAMdrive: Primo Software’s Ramdisk utility is a handy, convenient way to create a 12GB direct-IO ramdisk, meaning no indexing or caching is utilized and removes any bottlenecks associated with utilizing another storage device. File performance of the RAMdrive varies by I/O size but exceeds 6GB/s above 16KB IOPS with an overall peak of 12GB/s.

dBpoweramp R15.3: We transcode 500 FLAC encoded music files (14.4GB) into .M4A with the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) for playback on Apple devices. As no lossy compression is taking place, this minimizes the CPU workload while maximizing the amount of data written to the destination drive. Unfortunately this test is bottlenecked by our quad-core processor and would show more variance in results for systems with greater than four cores as dBpoweramp can fully load almost any size processor.

IOmeter – The most powerful piece of storage testing software freely available, IOmeter allows the creation of practically any kind of test workload. We first utilize it to dirty every new SSD before we test the four basics of every solid-state drive. We measure random 4K read and writes at 1QD and 32QD, as well as 2MB sequential read and writes with a queue depth of one. Each one of the six tests is run with a ten minute duration.

Additionally we have added Database, File Server, and Workstation scenarios back into our regular testing.  We have updated and modified the original three workload scenarios to bring them more in line with changes in workloads, access patterns, and disk IO sizes. These results are not comparable to the test scripts originally created and included with IOmeter nearly two decades ago.

Footnote – Disk I/O Tracing

If you are still reading our benchmark profile, thank you! It is not easy to devise tests that can tax a modern solid-state drive so if you have any suggestions or perhaps know of any applicable software that you would like to see added to our test regimen, please let us know. We are especially eager to add disk I/O trace recording and playback to replace the batch file testing we utilized in past storage reviews. We are still looking into how to make this possible, so if you know of a piece of software that doesn’t cost a few grand please drop us a note!

Futuremark PCMark 8

To start things off PCMark 8 scores the GAMMIX S10 squarely in the middle of the pack, however its 312MB/s bandwidth rating makes the S10 the second fastest result in the entire lineup of drives. It is no coincidence the three highest bandwidth scoring drives here are M.2 drives that are not bottlenecked by the SATA interface.

Iometer 2010 1.1.0

One thing to keep in mind is Iometer creates a test file that spans the entire size of the SSD. So it should come as no surprise that this can negate the SLC caching performance advantage of most drives in write workloads, yet even so the GAMMIX S10 somehow pulls out remarkable results here. While this allows us to see the raw performance of the NAND, ten minute saturation workloads are not even close to representative of the sort of work consumer drives would see in normal consumer use.

To our surprise the GAMMIX S10 not only delivers very strong performance, but consistently so across the entire gamut of tests. Whether it is a queue depth of one or thirty-two, the S10 places at the top or within the top three drives in every test. Fast SLC-caching is only needed when data is written to the drive, so the read performance results are quite telling. It is also clear that either the heat-spreader is performing its function, or the drive simply does not suffer from the thermal throttling issues that beleaguered the older model Samsung 950 M.2 drive.

Our new Iometer scenarios are more appropriate for enterprise and data-center SSDs, but due to the dearth of consumer programs that will stress modern SSDs, we have recreated the original Iometer usage scenarios with some modern, updated settings.

Each of the three scenarios runs for twenty minutes each with minimal time given between runs for the SSD to perform maintenance tasks like garbage cleanup or clearing any SLC fast-caches (if applicable). These tests are a worst-case scenario intended to highlight the underlying differences between solid-state drives that are well-hidden by new technologies such as fast-write SLC caching.

The GAMMIX S10 is the second ADATA drive to endure these three scenarios and consistent with its earlier performance blows the rest of the drives out of the charts. Admittedly that isn’t hard given it is the only M.2 drive in our three test scenarios. That said we have received a Samsung 970 EVO that is undergoing testing, so the GAMMIX S10 will receive some much tougher competition.

The seven-year-old Crucial m4 SSD does not have an SLC fast-cache and even back in its heyday did not have great random IOPS performance.  As far as intensive workloads are concerned, users on some of the early generations of SSDs would see some very tangible benefits to upgrading to a modern SATA solid-state drive even if the system in question does not support the newer M.2 drives.

AS SSD

AS SSD bypasses the Windows cache but it is only using a 1GB cache file for testing which easily fits within the SLC fast-write cache of modern drives. As such its strong performance is to be expected. Overall the S10 once again rivals even the Samsung 950, coming in second place but clearly well ahead of the pack. It is always a good sign when performance continues to scale with the higher queue depth tests as the S10 exhibits here. Interestingly the S10 even takes the top score for write performance in the 4K-64thrd test.