ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB SSD Review (Raid 0)

Solid State Drives (SSD) used to be a play thing for the wealthy enthusiast user, but prices have dropped so much in the last year that even those people on a strict budget can easily afford one. Adding an SSD to a system for boot and OS duties is one of the least expensive ways to improve overall system performance .... often dramatically. We have been reviewing ADATA products now for years and the SP900 has hit the UK market at £74,99 inc vat. The Premier Pro SP900 is the mainstream drive from ADATA focusing on creating a balance between price and performance. This drive uses a LSI Sandforce controller ... a company who have received their fair share of negative press for technical issues in specific drives from well known companies such as OCZ and Corsair. This drive has zero percent over provisioning - the same as the high performance XPG SX910 drive we reviewed back in July 2012. The first Sandforce based drives reserved around 28% of flash capacity for background tasks, such as maintenance and performance improvements. This dropped to 7% in recent years - meaning a 128GB drive would have 120GB free after formatting. The most recent drives use free space for the same tasks, meaning that unless the drive is almost completely full, you should experience none, or very limited performance penalties. ADATA sent two of their Premier Pro SP900 128GB drives to test in RAID. For £150 you could pick two of these up from Ebuyer and use either hardware RAID 0 to improve performance, or software RAID 0 to combine them to create a larger, faster backup or paging drive. The Premier Pro SP900 128GB SSD drives ship with a license for Acronis software, to back up or mirror your current drive. ADATA include a 3.5 inch adapter along with some literature. The ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB drives are enclosed in a simple chassis featuring the name, size and company name on the front and some technical details on the back. Inside the chassis - the SP900 128GB is half the dimensions of the chassis. We looked at the 256GB model in the past and it was the full 2.5 inch size. The drive is using the LSI SandForce SF-2241VB2-SPC controller, along with 4 32GB memory chips. Two drives formatted in RAID 0 - showing 238GB free. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Kitguru Test Rig 2 Compare system: CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Other Drives Visiontek Racer Series 120GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120GB Mushkin Chronos 240GB Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB OCZ Vertex 4 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update) Transcend SSD720 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw) Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB Corsair Performance Pro 256GB Samsung 830 Series 512GB Patriot Pyro SE 240GB Patriot Wildfire 240GB MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB ADATA S511 240GB Intel 510 120GB Corsair F100 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 120GB Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB PCIe drives test system: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD & OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalMark AS SSD PCMark 7 IOMeter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64. 4k QD32 performance results are not that high compared to leading drives released in the last year. The drive is not particularly a strong choice if you need to deal regularly with incompressible data. When we switch to compressible enabled 0x00 data mode the performance of the drives increase dramatically. Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. The drive scores well in ATTO - as this particular test utilizes compressible data for the sequential tests. In Raid 0 - the performance increases to 986 MB/s read and 930 MB/S write in the 2,048 test. By the time we reach the 8,192 test this increases to around 1,000 MB/s in both. Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. AS SSD only deals with incompressible data and this shows the particular weakness with this drive. In Raid 0, two of these drives perform at a significantly lower rate than many of the single leading solid state drives released earlier this year. Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months. PCMark 8 is the latest version in our popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs. This is the first instance we have used this benchmark to analyse SSD performance, so we will be using it as a reference point in future. On a side note, we do wish Futuremark had tuned this benchmark so it didn't take quite so long to complete (just over an hour in our testing). IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. Every company measures their IOPS performance in a different way, although we have been using this specific method for years. The results are modest, although as this is the 'mainstream' ADATA model we can accept slightly lower figures. There is no doubt that the 'Premier Pro' naming is somewhat confusing and misleading. Many enthusiast users would assume that the Premier Pro SP900 is the performance grade drive in the ADATA line up, but it isn't. The plainly labelled XPG products are the performance leaders and the Premier Pro are the mainstream range. In regards to performance, we can't help but feel slightly disappointed with the findings today. As our results show the Sandforce powered ADATA Premier Pro SP900 drive is not an ideal first choice if handling incompressible data is a primary requisite. The standard CrystalDiskMark bandwidth results mirrored the AS SSD findings - close to the bottom of the pile when forced to deal with incompressible data. The situation improves noticeably when we test with compressible data. Sequential read and write performance parameters almost double in CrystalDiskMark and the ATTO Disk Benchmark also highlights strong results. Around 1,000 MB/s per second in both sequential read and write tests for instance when configured in RAID 0. Pricing is going to be critical for ADATA in the United Kingdom and while £74.99 at Ebuyer seems like a good deal - we do feel it is slightly overpriced when compared against other 128GB drives currently available. Samsung, Sandisk and Kingston all have cheaper 128GB SSD products available today and some of them outperform the ADATA Premier Pro SP900 in the incompressible data tests. We have noticed over the years that ADATA do tend to release products in the United Kingdom at a higher pricepoint than some of the leading brands and unless they start to aggressively reduce their prices they are going to find these products a tough sell, especially as the competition is so intense. Pros: Good compressible data performance. Acronis software is bundled free. 3.5 inch drive bay included. Cons: outperformed by some competitor drives. UK pricing could be better. weak incompressible data performance. Kitguru says: The Sp900 is decent, but it faces stiff competition at the price. We would need to see some price reductions before giving it a higher recommendation.