XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 PCIe M.2 2280 Solid State Drive R/W 3500/3000MB/s SSD

The 1TB model is the right blend of cheap, fast, and good. Its got some interesting characteristics that you need to keep in mind though. The nand controller in here, is an SMI SM2262EN and its been setup in a way that people may not expect. Namely, when you sequential write to the drive itll go full blast for about 15-20% of whatever free space you have on the drive. Empty 1TB drive = ~3500Mbps until about 150GB. Then youll see your speed get cut anywhere from 50-80% while the nand controller adjusts its strategies for writing data. This write strategy should be invisible to most people. But, you really dont want to fill up this drive. Which is probably the exact opposite thing you want to do with storage. :) I suspect many people bought smaller capacity version of this, and have inadvertently hamstrung themselves. When buying SSDs with this specific controller, you want to buy the biggest capacity one you can afford or make sure that the system it is installed in doesnt do big data moves. Having said that, even at its slowest max sequential write, its still faster than a SATA SSD. If youre the type of person that leaves all your data on a NAS or external storage and just need a super fast boot drive, this thing is fantastic for the price. The reigning king of the cheap low tier NVME drives, especially when the 1TB model hits a lightning deal. If youre going to load up the drive and leave it at like 75% full all the time, youll probably want to look elsewhere. The SLC Cache strategy is going to bug the heck out of you and probably wont pass muster on SSD benchmarks in that state.

2TB Model Works well when I upgraded my Mac Pro 2013 from its original 256GB SSD to a 2TB ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro NVMe SSD. $7 adapter I used is a solid fit with this SSD. Multiple speed tests show consistent results. Had it in for almost 3 1/2 days and going strong. No sleep issues and completely stable - no crashing or restarts. Running the latest version of macOS Mojave. I strongly recommend this upgrade now that prices of NVMe SSD storage has dropped become more affordable. 1TB Model Installed the 1TB version in my Mac Pro Tower 4,1 (flashed to 5,1) as a Boot Drive running Mojave with a Radeon RX-580 Graphics Card. Some initial instability, but now appears to be rock solid once I reseated the PCIe adapter in the second (16x) slot. As with my previous OWC SATA 3 PCIe card, I had to put a small felt spacer between the adapter and the graphics card to provide enough clearance for the RX 580 fan to spin freely. Not as fast as this NVMe card could actually go, but still 3 times the read speed of the SATA 3 SSD I had in it and over 10x the write speed at ~1500MBps on both due to limitations of PCIe 2.0 4x interface - whereas a bridged adapter card would be required to max out this particular NVMe card speed of ~3000MBps on these Macs on the PCIe 2.0 16x lane slot.

This review is for the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB 3D NAND NVMe $78.99 at purchase. I never had an NVME drive before. I was building a new PC and had a budget. At first I was just going to use a SATA SSD that I already owned. After some research I decided it may be worth the money to give it a try. I selected this drive because of a PC Mag review (I dont think Amazon allows links so youll have to search for it). It is about 90% as fast as a Samsung 970 EVO Pro at about half the cost. Its easily as good as anything but that drive if not better. So I did my own tests once I had the system built. I was rather pleasantly surprised that the drive was 5X as fast as a fairly good (Wester Digital Blue) SATA SSD. I also have a HDD that I use for backups, it clocks in 30X faster than that. Note that given the architecture of these type of drives the 1GB version should be about 10-15% faster (for any brand). If, like me, you were wondering if these were worth the money the answer is absolutely yes. This particular model stands out for its value. Its not the fastest you can buy, but that extra 10% performance comes at 215% of the price. Highly recommended.

I work in IT and have over a dozen of these as well as pretty much every other SSD on the market. As many reviews in 2020-2021 mention, they did switch over an important part to something inferior, but that happens from time to time and Im not going to focus on this, I am just reviewing this as it is regardless of how much better and cheaper it was before. SPEED -- 1/5 This is worse than a SATA SSD that you can purchase at a lower price. Fully empty, when you initially benchmark it, it barely even gets the advertised speed. This is on the most optimal conditions, and even under these, the benchmark looks like PCIe Gen3 x 2 and not Gen3 x 4. This is bad. It cant outperform something 30% cheaper that came out years ago. CONSISTENCY - 0/5 The absolute worst drive of any kind I have seen in my entire life. Writing a SEQUENTIAL test file to fill half the disk took 59 minutes, so about an average of 290MB per second, so maybe a really really old Samsung SSD from 8 years ago. This was jumping around from 2GB/s to 4GB/s for the first 15 seconds maybe just enough to cheat on a benchmark and then immediately all over the place, not even 100GB written when it went from 1GB/s to 60MB/s and 1.3GB/s then 60MB/s, 500MB/s to 60MB/s, 200-800MB/s, then maybe halfway through 100-200MB/s (this is where it was most stable if you want to call it that.) Its like using a random number generator for performance. TECHNOLOGY - 0/5 This uses SLC caching, has DRAM cache, basically a bunch of advanced methods to make it better and it performs worse than any drive Ive seen without any of that stuff. This is apparently TLC which is supposed to be superior to QLC. Basically, QLC tries to cram more. QLC is supposed to be slower, and less durable. This somehow performs about half as good as the same brand QLC which is baffling because the other model is supposed to be actually based on the XPG 8100, not the XPG 8200 PRO. As in, a 4TB version of this (double 2TB) that costs less than 2 times more even though 4TB is supposed to go up exponentially in price, performs better and more consistent as QLC than this TLC thats supposed to be the superior model of the same brand. VALUE - 0/5 This is where Ill quickly mention that the old version apparently was good, and therefore it means this is overhyped. No one bothers to update their reviews and no one bothers to research it further so they all immediately read or see something online and think this is a great value. Since XPG knows this, they basically charge way more for this model due to the high demand even though to give them some credit, XPG seems to have other better models. For some reason, and I doubt it was due to bad intentions, they had to switch the controller on these and it happened to be a bad choice. I think XPG probably ended up getting bait and switched by Silicon Motion, the supplier for the controller. Apparently this newer version thats bad is SM2262G and the old one is SM2262EN, but they did the switch over because the old version, although it performed almost on par with some of the best drives like Samsung (at a lower price, at the time) it had a shorter life. So I assume they switched over to this one to make it more reliable and ended up absolutely thrashing performance. Again, to be fair, this XPG 8200 Pro does have a good warranty, assuming they honor it properly. This is unfortunately the trade-off youll make unless you end up paying double for enterprise NVMe SSDs: the more consistently fast it is, the more likely it is to die 2-3x sooner. LIFE - 3/5 I have no reason to believe the life of this product would be lower than similarly priced NVMe SSDs. Since its TLC, itll have a better life by default versus QLC. The amount of writes you have to do to the drive to void the warranty is 1.5-3x more than competitors but I guess their strategy is to make sure you can never physically write that much to the disk by making it slow! TBW is 1280 which basically means you can write 700GB to it every day for 5 years. This means youd have to constantly write to it at about 8MB per second, or about 24MB/s assuming youre only using the computer 8 hours a day, lets say for work. This card will probably struggle to do that depending on what youre doing with it, how small the files are; the random speed test as I was constantly using it was probably about 27MB/s so barely above this threshold. So they do literally try to keep you from ever reaching that point by just making sure its slow and bad. GET ANY OTHER DRIVE. LITERALLY ANY OTHER ONE.

My review of the XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 PCIe M.2 2280 Solid State Drive R/W 3500/3000MB/s SSD (ASX8200PNP-2TT-C) (SM2262EN Controller Version) Previous purchases include: Crucial P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe Internal SSD, up to 2000MB/s - CT1000P1SSD8 Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD, up to 560MB/s - CT1000MX500SSD1(Z) and I use the former in a Plugable USB-C NVMe enclosure (USB 3.1 Gen 2) and the latter in an OWC Mercury On-The-Go (USB 3.0) enclosure. Both were attached to a CalDigit TSI3+ Dock respectively. The first was used for media files (ripped CDs, downloads and home video projects) were the second was used for audio content related to DAW projects and accompanying software library content. While pushing upwards on the capacity of both 1TB SSD I opted to increase my available capacity and chose the XPG SX8200. My purchase decision was influenced by a YouTube review on Tech Deals SSD Review — 8 NVMe M.2 Drives Tested — Which Should You Buy? — 2019 Edition Truthfully, I imagine I would have pleased with any of the competing devices. Using the XPG SX8200 in an OWC Envoy Express TB3 enclosure. In real world use I perceive the speed advantage over USB 3.x as a noticeable lack of latency when accessing files in Apple Music or Logic Pro. Black Magic Speed Test demonstrates a clear advantage. Note, none of my home projects tax the bandwidth of these bus speeds - capacity is the issue I addressed. This device is run off the TB3 port on a 16 15-inch MBP (bring on the M1 processor!) Ive recently purchased a second XPG SX8200/Envoy Express combo with an eye towards repurposing the older devices within the household. Went to register the new device on the ADATA web page today and they appear to be having issues - didnt experience this when I registered the 1st XPG. I hope you are as pleased with the XPG SX8200 as I am.

Installed easy and even had a heating pad for it not to overheat works like a beaut and nice price.

Upgraded 2015 macbook pro at less than half the cost of apple authorised upgrade. Easy install but requires compatible adapter.

WOW! This M.2 is amazing! I went from using a SATA SSD and thought the performance difference wasnt going to be much better but I am pleased to say its quite the opposite! The price is also amazing and I have read it rivals Samsung and their performance. This M.2 loads windows almost instantly and the way I was able to tell the difference is the ability of right when windows launches to the desktop you can open a bunch of applications with no buffering or wait time Pros: Good price Amazing performance comes with DIY heatsink (This thing runs very hot!) Cons: -Setup didnt come with the screw all M.2s require but I was able to manage with my specific case. -Not specific to ADATAs M.2 but most mother boards SATA connections are canceled when you install a M.2 which caused issues with my OS SSD not showing up. Reading the motherboards manual to see what SATAs get shutoff when you install an M.2 is vital and will save you time on the troubleshooting when ur PC wont boot because it -shut off your other drives. -Didnt come with screw to install into MOBO

Replaced a 1tb drive was easy to clone too.

UPDATE 04/12/2020 1 star to 5 Amazon replaced the order right away and the replacement SSD has been working like a champ. I dont have any metrics etc but its been stable and working fine for 6 months now. Like many others, mine just stopped working and not showing up in BIOS. Installation and migrating Win10 from a 3 year old Samsung 950 Pro 256 SSD C: OS drive was easy and everything worked great for 10 days. I am giving adata one last try and have a replacement on the way (easy process through Amazon). Ill update this review accordingly but it will take much longer than 10 days for me to adjust the rating higher if the replacement works out. Now, the shame on me part. The very thing that I was trying to avoid, which was reinstalling Windows and apps, is now inevitable. After I migrated the OS over from my Samsung and booted with the adata, I installed it in this (Mailiya M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter - Support M.2 PCIe 2280, 2260, 2242, 2230), formatted it and set it up as a cache drive for video editing. That works great btw. Shame on me for not keeping the data on the Samsung or even backing up the OS, at least for a while....just in case. Ugh.