ADATA Premier SP550 480GB Solid-State Drive Review

The benefits of solid-state drives are easy to wax poetic about, but the proof is in having utilized a system equipped with one. The sheer responsiveness can feel like a full system upgrade and raises the bar for what to expect from the device (even a console can see a boost!).

In the modern age of instant gratification having programs open on demand instead of waiting for them to load just seems natural, which may be why the idea of waiting half a minute or longer for a computer to boot seems ludicrous today.

Unfortunately the biggest factor slowing solid-state drive adoption has always been the steep cost of entry. Budget SSDs may not be glamorous and certainly don’t get a lot of attention, but an entry-model SSD is still playing in a completely different league from the fastest hard drives available.

This brings us to the Premier SP550 series, ADATA’s entry-model solid-state drives which feature TLC flash with SLC buffering. Please note ADATA does sell the SP550 in SATA and M.2 form-factors, but for this review we will be benchmarking the 480GB SATA model.

Unlike some other budget SSDs that are forgoing the DRAM cache it is nice to see ADATA’s SP550 still makes use of a DDR3 256MB DRAM cache buffer for improved performance consistency. As for data protection, the Silicon Motion SM2256 controller utilizes the standard combination of LDPC and a form of NAND RAID parity checking for monitoring of data integrity and ECC support.

For utilities ADATA offers a download of Acronis True Image HD for data migration use with its SSDs. Also available is ADATA’s SSD Toolbox software which provides firmware updates, secure erase functionality, OS optimization, drive status information and of course diagnostic options.

To ensure all drives have fair representation regardless of capacity we use IOMeter to conduct continuous file writes beyond twice the rated capacity of each SSD. This will make sure every block has been written to at least once including the unaddressable spare area present on all solid-state drives, ensuring all drives begin testing in a normalized “dirty” state.

SATA drives will be tested on an Intel 6Gbps SATA port, while PCIe cards will use the PCIe Gen 3 x8 slot to the processor. M.2 drives will make use of a PCIe adapter card in this same slot to bypass the M.2 x2 interface bottleneck, allowing drives to utilize the maximum bandwidth (PCIe Gen 3 x4) that the M.2 interface supports. Where applicable we will ensure drives are using the NVM Express protocol.

The test system’s processor has had Intel’s Speedstep and Turbo Boost functionality disabled and all cores are locked to the same 3.7GHz frequency in order to ensure maximum consistency between test runs.