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Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, power on information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. We can see that the ADATA SX300 SSD is capable of TRIM as it is not greyed out as with AAM.
For our CDI portrayal, we thought it might be interesting to put the SMART data of both the ADATA XPG SX300 (left) and MyDigitalSSD (right) side by side….twins?
ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
Initial performance results of 552MB/s read and 525MB/s write are excellent results for any mSATA SSD and right in line with manufacturers listed specifications.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill/compressible) or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Many new SandForce Driven SSD owners who can’t wait to test the performance of their SSD often grab this program and run a quick test, not realizing that they are testing with incompressible data rather than compressible data used in testing by manufacturers. We have provided compressible (oFill) results on the left with incompressible (random data) results on the right.
The difference in testing with compressible versus incompressible data samples becomes evident when we put these results side by side. The low 4k random write performance of 104MB/s is excellent and this is only the second time we have seen it from an mSATA SSD, the first being with the Mushkin Atlas mSATA 240GB SSD.
the sx300 256GB costs $270 @ Newegg…
How do we know if it is compatible with Lenovo T420s? Manufacturer website does not provide such information. Kindly suggest.
A simple Google search always helps.
Does the SandForce controller on this msata ssd is good than other controller? Which msata sdd is fast and best quality?
This is an excellent mSATA SSD and the fact that it offers 7% additional space just might be key here. With respect to controllers, the main competitors in the market today (SandForce, Marvel, Samsung) have all earned a reputation of quality simply because of company development and experience in the industry.
I recently purchased this mSATA SSD for my HP Elitebook 2740p and performed a clean install of Windows 8 RTM. The SSD is a ADATA ASX300S3-256GM-C MSA which they list on their website as the XPG SX200.
I frequently experience a Blue Screen on Windows 8 after resuming from sleep.
The SSD is my boot disk. It’s about half full. Running chkdsk at boot time shows no errors. Windows Disk Management reports the drive as healthy.
The Crash Dump analysis output (all the dumps are similar to this) shows the following:
ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc00000c0 – This device does not exist.
BUGCHECK_STR: 0x7a_c00000c0
DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: WIN8_DRIVER_FAULT
I checked again today and I can confirm I have the latest firmware for this model.
Thanks for that Sol. I was just about to purchase this mSATA SSD to install Windows 8 on it on my ASRock PC! Will now just replace the standard HDD with a SATA SSD with the likes of a Vertex 4 or so. Thanks again for posting this 🙂
Where is firmware 5.0.3/5.0.4?
Work on windows 8?
Of course…all storage device work in recent OS releases.
Be aware – I bought this from Amazon and returned it and tried again…. both times, this card does NOT WORK on the Drobo 5D.
Great reviews. My question is simple, Crucial M4 256GB vs ADATA XPG SX300, what difference,if any, is there between these 2 ssd’s The m4 is 50+ dollars cheaper. Is the Adata msata drive , although better on paper, going to give me better performance on my laptop in the real world?
And real-world use, you, or even an SSD expert, cannot visually tell a difference in typical day-to-day operations. Both solid-state drives would do great in your system. Both have great reputations. Unless you are looking for something specific where higher incompressible data testing is necessary, I would simply look at the price.
Thanks when you say “visually” I interpret that to be things like boot time, program opening, shutdown times etc. It is the write speed that stands out for me the Adata being in the 500mb+ per second and the m4 not breaking 300mb per second. Those numbers really mean nothing in term of real life use?
Real life user in typical use yes. Unless you are transferring large incompressible files you will never be able to visually see a difference.
In real world i think the m4 ssd will perform as well as the ADATA drive. ADATA drive (sandforce driven) will never reaches the announced performance. It relates only an optimal situation with compressible data.
Yes but compressible data is what we see in operating systems and software and can’t be overlooked. In the typical user scenario, it would be impossible to tell the difference.
So I bought the adata sx300 256gb drive I installed it but it appears to give me only 238.5 gb is that correct? I understood from your review that this drive gives us that 7% lost space or is that not the case?
That is exacty the case as shown in our report and explained.
this is what I took from your report -For those LSI SandForce lovers, it is like getting an extra 7% capacity for free. I guess what i was wondering was is 238.5 gb typical for this drive?
oK I found the available drive space in your Anvil Storage Utility snapshot 238.5 thanks.
Please join the forums and posts screen shots of your system and not with the CPU states altered please.
Which Adata sdd would you recommend today: the SX300, or SP310? Almost the same price (SP310 a tad cheaper).
I have had two of these drives fail in my Msi GE70 within a year. I’m going back to conventional HDD’s.
You need to ask yourself what occurred…. Were they fresh installs? What was similar betwen both instances?
Here are a couple of similarities:
1. Both were Adata SX300 mSATA 256GB SSD’s
2. Both were installed in the same system (MSi GE70 Core-i7-3630M, 8GB DDRIII RAM, Nvidia GeForce 660M)
3. Both crashed within less than 6 months
4. Both crashed after waking up the laptop from sleep
5. Both were gone from the BIOS after the crash
After a couple of searches on Google I found out that I’m not suffering alone as these are crashing all over the place. It looks like it might be a problem with the Sandforce controller – but don’t take my word for it – I’m an accountant.