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

Rating: 7.5.

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.

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