DATA SU800 1 TB SSD test - 3D NAND, on its own way

The ADATA brand does not sound unknown in Hungary either, they have been present on the Hungarian market for decades, their success is mainly due to their USB flash drives, which boast good price / performance, and their solid state drives (SSDs). It is exponentially true for both product lines that wolf laws prevail, if the product is not good enough and the price tailored is not good enough, that product will not be put in the basket. There are a lot of manufacturers and various redesigned solutions, so there is a lot of competition, but we also considered ADATA in the first league on the SSD front. Now, we’ll get to know the second largest member of the Ultimate product line, the SU800 family, a 1TB unit, and see if it deserves to continue to be where it has been so far.

The manufacturer launched this product line about 2,5 years ago, the special feature of which was that for the first time under the auspices of ADATA it included 3D nand flash chips instead of a planar solution (the pioneer of which was Samsung). On the one hand, they have more to do than traditional TLC solutions, on the other hand, they can be cheaper to manufacture, and a few lines up, we've been talking about how important pricing is.

So we can say that ADATA pulled the mandatory, but it doesn’t matter how. Since the company does not manufacture 3D nand tiles itself, it does not matter where you get them. Well, thankfully, he didn’t seem to leave things to chance, because - if our information is correct - he gets the raw material from IMFT, which is operated by Micron and Intel, so we’re unlikely to face any quality issues. Of course, a good NAND flash is one thing, you also need a good controller - in this respect, the choice was made for the Silicon Motion SM2258 chip, which can handle up to four channels. Another special feature is the cache management, as it can not only work with DRAM chips, but also with a TLC flash configured for SLC mode. So the basics are promising, let’s take a closer look at the test copy!

Specification:

Box, accessories

The 800TB solution of the ADATA SU1 came in a basically dark, yet shimmering box in several shades, with key info on the cover such as manufacturer, model number, capacity, product photo, and now the 3D nand mark. The back side is also exciting, here you can use the alignment of the uploaded QR codes to get to two download pages, where you can get the SSD Toolbox (fw update, status monitoring, etc.) and the Acronis True Image HD data recovery and cloning software ( after registration). Great program, I use it too, I recommend it to everyone!

In addition to the drive, the contents of the box are provided by some documentation and a self-adhesive plastic frame. Because the device’s metal housing is 7mm wide, it fits in even the thinnest notebooks, but if installed in place of a thicker hard drive, we can call the frame for fixed placement, which compensates for the height difference.

The SU800 is a 2,5-inch standard size with a standard SATA connector, which is of course the latest standard (SATA III) and is capable of a data transfer rate of up to 6 Gb / s. The top of the product is decorated with a product sticker with a standard ADATA hummingbird, while the belly of the drive has a white label that contains important information such as the serial number, which is why it is worth paying attention to its integrity.

Test configuration:

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE AB350-Gaming 3
• CPU: AMD Ryzen R5 2400G
• RAM: 2 × 8 GB Corsair LPX 3200 MHz
• PSU: FPS Hydro 450
• Housing: SilverStone HTPC
• OS: Windows 10 1803 (Samsung 970 EVO-N)
• Mass storage: ADATA SU800 1 TB, Kingston SA400 240 GB, Samsung 840 EVO (ThinkPad T530)

As you can see, I also put two opponents next to the SU800, one from the rather popular Kingston A400 and the other from an ancient Samsung 840 EVO, even from the beginning of the TLC era. I actually only included him in the article to see how much the world has changed over the years in terms of technology development (since in my case, the test environment is also dedicated to other guiding values).

test Results

The first measurement app is the AS SSD benchmark, which I like because anyone can download it for free, in a matter of seconds, and even have the largest measurement - using a 10GB sample - in a matter of minutes, which is why I haven’t left it out of the line right now.

The ADATA SU800 has shown confident performance, and while it can take advantage of being 1TB, the numbers are reassuring. The A400 didn't go bad either, the 840 EVO still holds its own in sequential measurement, but you can already see that time has passed.

The second test program is Crystal DiskMark, which I like to use for similar reasons as the AS-SSD benchmark. It is available in seconds and does not need to be run for hours. I used the largest sample file of 32 GB for the measurement.

There was no need to be disappointed in the SU800 either, its scientific advantage compared to the Kingston A400 was clear, especially in the 4KiBQ8T8 measurement. This test also showed my 840 EVO is slowly getting worth retiring.

The last measurement software can't be other than the ATTO disk benchmark, which on the one hand provides a fairly detailed set of information, and on the other hand they can sweat the drives quite seriously. I used a file size of 32 GB and a depth of 256 (Queue Depth) for testing, so SSDs struggled with it for quite a few minutes.

Of the three test programs, perhaps the most balanced here was the fight between the ADATA SU800 and the Kingston A400, still performing affordably in 840 EVO reading.

Evaluation, final word

The 800 terabyte version of the ADATA SU1 made a positive impression on me during my short stay here. The technologies used are the latest, the 3D nand used comes from a quality source, it performed well in the tests, so we can't have a sense of lack so far, so it's time to get acquainted with the purchase price. The price of a copy with a capacity of 1 TB is below 40 forints in most well-known webshops, for 000-38 forints.

The Kingston A400 960GB edition with traditional TLC nand flash chips is about 6-7000 forints cheaper, which seems like a realistic difference, although I might want to get this extra because of the +40GB capacity and 3D nand, even then even if both products have a 3-year warranty. If 1 TB isn’t enough for someone, you can also opt for the 800 TB version of the SU2, but if you can handle less, the 128/256/512 GB edition is also available.

We got the SU800 1 TB SSD from ADATA for testing, which we thank you for this!