Final Thoughts
ADATA once again has a great NVMe solid state drive on their hands. The main difference between this drive and the SX8200 we reviewed last year is the controller. Using the SMI SM2262EN controller ADATA was able to bring up not only the read speeds, but the write speeds as well, which makes this drive very competitive with major brands like Samsung and WD.
In our testing the drive performed pretty close to the rated 3500 MB/s read and 2300 MB/s write that ADATA advertises. For example in CrystalDiskMark the drive scored 3475.4 MB/s in the read test and 2368.6 MB/s in the write test. This drive also had the best PCMark 8 storage benchmark score out of all of the NVMe drives we’ve tested!
One thing that I really like is that ADATA makes the heatsink DIY. Many new motherboards come with nice M.2 heatsinks, which go with the overall theme of the board. So you are not required to use the ADATA heatsink.
Just like many drives the XPG SX8200 Pro makes use of SLC caching, but since they have dual cache chips you’ll be able to have longer sustained writes without seeing an immediate performance drop.
Right now the 512GB version of the drive, which we reviewed today is only $107.95 at our favorite online retailer. That is only 21 cents per gigabyte, which is great for a drive with this type of performance and don’t forget you get a 5-year warranty with the drive as well. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro Solid State Drive a 10 out of 10 score and our Good Value Award!
Pros:
– One of the fastest drives we’ve tested
– DIY heatsink
– 5-year warranty
– Improvements over the original SX8200
– Price
Cons:
– None that we found
