ADATA XPG SX300 256GB mSATA SSD Review

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER 3.9.3

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 VER. 2.46

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.

About the Author

Les Tokar is a technology nut and Founder of The SSD Review. His early work includes the first consumer SSD review along with MS Vista, Win 7 and SSD Optimization Guides. Les is fortunate to, not only evaluate and provide opinion on consumer and enterprise solid state storage but also, travel the world in search of new technologies and great friendships. Google+