Final Thoughts
ADATA has done a really great job of rebranding their original SX7000 to appeal to more people, the XPG Gammix S10 is basically the SX7000 with a flashy heatspreader. That heatspreader design is actually pretty awesome and is going to look great in your system, especially if you have a side panel window. Heatspreader aside this drive makes use of the Silicon Motion SM2260 controller with Micron 3D TLC flash.
Looking at our results in most tests the drive was right around 1400 MB/s read and 850 MB/s write. Which if you look at the advertised speeds the read speed is around 400 MB/s off from the 1800 MB/s ADATA says the drive will operate at. I am guessing this is because we only had the 256GB version of the drive. Now ADATA does state on the specifications page that Performance may vary based on SSD capacity, but I really wish they would list the actual speed differences between capacities. I am guessing based on other reviews that the 128GB and 256GB versions have speeds of 1400 MB/s read and 850 MB/s write, and the 512GB and 1TB versions run at the advertised speeds.
With these speeds to drive is definitely faster than your SATA III solid state drive, but it is not the fastest M.2 drive out there. This is because ADATA has gone with TLC NAND instead of MLC. TLC NAND does store data more efficiently and the chips are less expensive, but when using these chips write performance takes a hit. ADATA does make use of a DRAM caching chip to mitigate this issue and for the most part you really aren’t going to notice a speed decrease as no normal application is going to write that much data. But you are going to see better performance from a MLC-based drive.
Right now you can pick up this drive (256GB) at our favorite online retailer for $96.99, which at that price makes it a great OS drive that is going to be much faster than a SATA III SSD. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ADATA XPG Gammix S10 M.2 Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Faster than a SATA III SSD
– Good pricing
– Sleek heatsink
– 5-year warranty
Cons:
– Not the fastest drive out there
– Lower performance when doing long writes
– XPG logo is upside down when installed in our system
