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

The drive is excellent. The downloadable software consists of an old version of the oem Acronis clone software and something called SKHSSD. The latter will not recognize the drive since it was not partitioned and formatted. The Acronis software insists that one log in or set up an Acronis account before using. The problem is that somewhere in the past I bought the home edition of the Acronis software. So when I tried to set up a new account I was told that I already had an account and when I went through the forgot password loop they sent my old serial number to me. That serial number didnt work with the new software. The story goes on but Ill jump to the end. The only way I could use the disk cloning software was to upgrade my old version of the Acronis software adding a cost of $40. The drive is an excellent product and is noticeably faster than the older 128Gb PCIe NVMe boot drive my computer came with. The terabyte is a great relief after a few years of worrying about filling up the boot drive.

Cant recommend it. I grabbed the 500GB version based on nice reviews from Toms Hardware, PC World and a few other go to sites. The generic crystal benchmarks are on par with the website specs showing 3000Mbps+ reads and 2200Mbps+ writes - note that they always advertise max writes based on the 1TB drive as well (over 3000Mbps) and its really hard to find the smaller drive specs on the manufacturer page. PC World says it even rivals and bests the Samsung 970 Pro in many tests. Well, unfortunately, the synthetic benchmarks are just that and you should take the them with a grain of salt. 1) at least Samsung now shows the performance of the drives when they run out of TLC cache on the EVO and EVO Plus. When transferring large files, expect no more than 900Mbps write for the 500GB Samsung EVO drives. On the XPG, I cant find that information on their website, but after several of my own 8GB single file transfers to this drive, it usually falls between 400Mbps and 600Mbps in a matter of seconds and fluctuates in that range, although occasionally reaching 900Mbps for very brief periods. This is a far cry from the 500GB versions specifications and well below the capabilities of my existing and older/smaller PCIe NVME drives. You might say these speeds are based on my hardware or the file being transfered, but then why do the older drives in my system still perform better under the same conditions and closer to their advertised speeds? My older 256GB Samsung 950 Pro still outpaces it with a steady 900Mbps on the same file writes and my other first generation MyDigital BPX 500GB also sees 900Mbps writes with the same file tests. Ive also swapped the 3 drives so they each test the file copies in the onboard m.2 slot and the 2 different PCI adapters on the 16 and 8 lane slots. While the Samsung and BPX are relatively consistent at about 900Mbps write copies onto them, the XPG is usually below 600Mbps in these real world file transfers. So, yeah, it meets the Crystal DiskMark test specs, but performs leaps and bounds slower than the advertised speeds when it comes to writing larger files (8GB files arent overly huge when you consider backup software and Blu-ray isos are much larger). Id look elsewhere for your next PCIe NVMe purchase. The price is great at $99, but not when you realize its barely on PAR with standard SATA ssds in real-world file transfers that fall well below the advertised speeds of inflated and synthetic benchmarks.

I ordered this drive again two years after the first time, because my storage needs on the same PCI Gen3-capable board had increased, and the price & more recent reviews on this remained competitive. I had heard in the intervening time that ADATA had switched from the SM2262EN to the SM2262G controller, potentially affecting performance; had then heard that after public backlash they had switched back to the EN (this later revision referred to as “ENG,” and functionally equivalent to “EN,” not to “G”). That said, I was unsure whether old G controllers were still in distribution channels, especially given logistics concerns over the past two years. Unfortunately, the product listing is not specific, and I didn’t think to reach out to customer service to ask the question, until after I had placed my order. The automated response said to expect a response from a person within a few days AFTER I was due to receive the part; uh oh. But luckily, I got a response by the next day after my query, assuring me the item they had coming out to me was the “EN(G)” variant, and even guiding me on how to check once I had the packaging open, likewise assuring me that if it were “G,” I could send it right back & receive the correct one in replacement. When it arrived, it was indeed the ENG variant, matching both items I had received from them in the past. This experience of getting the ENG unit may not match your own, so if concerned, I urge you to reach out BEFORE ordering! That said, the speed and temperature profile of the one I received seems comparable to the original units, and the original review (below) stands, except that it’s now only about 2/3 the price it was then; even better! — Original review from 1/2020 below: MUCH cheaper than roughly equivalent Samsung units, with little performance hit. Especially on OSes for which the NVMe driver is not optimized for raw speed (say, macOS testing with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, as opposed to Windows testing with CrystalDiskMark), the difference is likely negligible for most workloads, for a whole lot of savings. I chose not to use the included, but flimsy heatsink sheet, in favor of the one that came with the motherboard. Using that, I’ve never topped 40°C in the slot directly below the CPU (even under loads that put the CPU up to 85°C with a good but not amazing air cooler, in a case/fan config that’s admittedly pretty good for cooling).

I needed to upgrade the storage capacity on my HP Elite X2 tablet. This seemed just the ticket. I had no idea how much it would increase the speed over my stock hard drive. It was significant. For example, when I open a specific program it shows a famous quote while the program is loading. With the old hard drive I could read the quote with time to spare. Many of those quotes were 20-25 words. With this new drive, I cant read 3 words before it is gone and the program is loaded. I didnt realize there would be that much difference with M.2 drives but this thing is blazing fast!

Easy install and fast speeds, so far so good

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.

I have the 500GB and the 1TB versions of this drive and have personally bench marked both of them and theyre screaming fast. The 500GB drive blows away the more expensive 500GB Samsung Evo 970 Plus in sustained write performance. The more expensive Samsung can only sustain around 800 MB/sec while this drive does 2100 MB/sec or almost 3 times faster! They both can briefly write at over 3000 MB/sec but thats using the cache on the drive. Once the cache fills up (around 20GB - 30GB) the 500GB Samsung falls to around 800 MB/sec. The 1TB versions of both drives are even faster. To put this in perspective lets say you had 100GB of videos to copy or move to this drive. The Samsung EVO 970 Plus would take over 2 minutes while the XPG SX 8200 Pro would take only 48 seconds. While ADATA (XPG) doesnt have the reputation of Samsung, Intel or Crucial, theyre using among the best controller (Silicon Motion SM 2262EN) and flash chips (Intel/Micron) available in these drives. I also suspect the firmware is mostly from Silicon Motion. Incidentally, the HP EX950 SSD uses the same controller, same flash, and has very similar performance but generally costs more than the SX8200 Pro. These drives also have similar endurance ratings to the more expensive Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Time will tell if the XPG drives prove to be as reliable as most Samsung models from the past have. But in terms of price, specs, warranty, reviews, benchmarks, endurance, etc, this drive matches or beats Samsung in just about every category.

works great in my asrock b365 pro4 motherboard,i59400f. for my system and for gamming this is the best VME i ever had, hell with sata 3, with a score of 280% in user bench mark. this thing rocks, 10 dollars for 100gigabytes x5. you cant beat it. i cant yet tell you the life span of it for i just got it, But its been 2 months and its awsome. honestly who needs Samsung. the latency diffrence you could never notice. i cant believe i got 500 gigs for under 55$. its the cheapest and fastest thing i ever had. i suppose the only question now is, and i speak for any V nand technology and thats just the life span. well if it doesnt atleast live upto its proposed lifespan of ill be back to let you know, i encourage everyone to buy this had to buy another just to get a working set. i purchased 2 cheap and very slow micro 32 gig cards, will never buy again

I own the 1TB model and also the 512TB model and I plan to buy more for my upcoming builds. I have had zero problems with either of the drives. Here are the most important things I have learned in the process: 1.) Do *NOT* set your BLCK to anything other than 100MHz after installing any (not just this brand/model) M.2 drive; it will mess your drive installation up. 2.) Do not download or use XPGs version of Acronis. 3.) XPG also offers Macrium Reflect with these drives. Do download/use this software. It not only does it make cloning easy and painless, but it is a full featured software for backing up and restoring. Unlike other free softwares with drives, it does not restrict you to a drive that you bought; it will backup or restore any drive in the installed system. Especially with the 512GB drive, this is an amazing value. I paid $70 for the 512 GB drive, and the regular full version of Macrium Reflect costs about that much. To access the download, go to Adatas site (not XPG), and look for the link to Valuable software. It is something like consumer->support->download->valuable software. Not easy to find. 4.) The heatsink that comes with this drive is useless (except cosmetically). However, this drive does not really need a heatsink; it is very power efficient. 5.) If you cant find the M.2 screw in your motherboard box, look on the board itself; that is where I found mine. If you cant find it in either place, you are going to need to order a screw kit. You may want to check this before ordering any M.2 drive as none of them come with the screw. 6.) Use a magnetic screwdriver while installing your M.2 drive. You will be sorry if you dont. 7.) I got slightly better drive performance after adjusting my ring bus ratio. YMMV. 8.) There are very few ways that the speed of this drive can be felt as compared to a SATA SSD, but 3000MB/s sounds awesome, huh? 9.) Having components on only one side makes these drives good for laptop use. Drives with components on both sides dont always fit. I hope this helps.

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.