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

I have had a open NVME M.2 2280 slot open on my Lenovo 330s 15IKB GTX 1050 since August 2018 and was waiting to slap a drive in it to expand on the Mushkin Reactor SSD SATA 1TB I already had from my previously dead laptop. I did some research and got this drive. I decided to drop an extra $25 on this one vs some of the slightly cheaper NVME 1tb drives based on various reviews. It installed fine and I used the included heat sink as the secondary one I purchased with a screw kit would not fit in the laptop. Here is my computer info System SKU LENOVO_MT_81GC_BU_idea_FM_ideapad 330S-15IKB GTX1050 Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz, 1801 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB The benchmark with the drive empty as my secondary drive is impressive and came in a lot higher than others i had seen on the Amazon reviews. Benchmarks are just simulated results but i expect this drive to perform well. During the benchmark the temp rose to 64 deg which is a high load test and it idles at 46 deg with the included heat sink. If I remember I will update the review with some real world data after it run it with games and full of files. I intend to load the OS and programs on the NVME and if I see any changes or issues with the performance I will update the review with temperatures and performance. If the drive ends up running 2 hot I will look at installing one of the flat copper heat-sinks I have seen on amazon. The drive installed fine and was recognized automatically. I did a quick format using disk manager in windows 10 and was able to run the benchmarks on it quickly. This upgrade makes this a pretty decent budget gaming laptop even now with it 2 years old.

I purchased the 3500mb/s version of the 2TB model and I think that 3500 must be an average of the read and write speeds. (Please refer to the attached screenshot from Blackmagics diskspeed test tool.) The drive is installed into a PCIe4 slot on an x570mobo with a 3900x. Note that this test is performed after having the drive for a year and using it as my frequently played Steam games drive. It has about 300gigs of tv shows and a terabyte of games like GTA5, some Bioshocks, Monster Hunter World. So the drive has seen fair use over time both in sequential reading as well as random access. I *FEEL* like Monster Hunter loads more quickly off of the NVME versus the SATA3 SSD I had it on before this, but MHW on PC is so much better than PS4 I cant be sure (nor bothered to move the install back to check). This doesnt do a damned thing for GTA5 (or online) load times. GTA5 is bad and nothing helps it perform well. Shame upon Rockstar and all their managers. The poor performance here is nothing to do with the drive, though. Watching shows requires almost no speed, so if you wanted to waste your money on this instead of a rust drive for storing video, the experience would be fine. Ive done a little video editing off of this (720p60 prores) and it feels good. While I wouldnt dare use this as a capture destination, storing proxies here has, in my experience, been good. I dont believe that reading off of it affects drive life, but I dont know enough about that to talk about it beyond how it felt. The proxies I made were done overnight, so I dont know what effect the drive speed might have had. Im content with the drive, and am content with the price I paid (270usd) but I wouldnt blindly buy a second one and will definitely do research on competition in the future. I have no opinion about the manufacturer or its support structure, as the drive still works fine a year in.

Here are a few metrics I looked at: --------------------------------------------------- Performance - I honestly only care about 4k speeds. Im not transferring huge files so the better the small file speed, the better. You always wait a few seconds for bit file transfers, so shaving off a couple seconds isnt a big deal. Overall responsiveness is better with 4k, so I prefer 4k. If you look at the 4k mixed @ UserBenchmark & sort, capacities of approx 1/2 TB & ignore the expensive Optane, it ranks #4 at 76.7 with #1 (970 EVO) at 85.4, about a 11% difference. Looking at other various reviewers (HotHardware, TweakTown, etc), their original reviews show strong 4k performance. It did seem to be a bit behind for a sequential mixed workload. --------------------------------------------------- Performance / Price - at 76.7 / $80 = 0.95 perf / dollar. With the 970, you get 85.4 / $110 or 0.78 perf / dollar. While the 970 EVO is roughly 11% faster with 4k, its about 22% more in the performance / dollar metric. This is using 4k mixed from UserBenchmark. --------------------------------------------------- Thermals - Im using it in a Lenovo P52 laptop via special M.2 SSD caddy. During a 40gb file transfer from main Samsung SSD to this one, it hit about 40 celsius. During CrystalDiskMark, it hit about 46 degrees. Thats acceptable with only the thin metal heatsink. I strongly recommend a proper SSD heatsink if using a standard MB & not a laptop. --------------------------------------------------- NOTE: I have pictures to attach, but theres no option in this review presently to attach them. Here are notes about them once I am able to: I did a 39 gb file transfer from my Samsung SSD to the new Adata. The xfer rate on my P52 laptop ranged from about 500-800 GBytes/sec. During the first 10 seconds, as youd expect, it definitely hit over 1600 MBytes / sec, but slowed to 500-800 sustained. During a run of CrystalDiskMark, it hit 46 degrees but settled to 32 idle. Here are the results in text: Seq Q32T1 - 3342 R / 2212 W 4KiB Q8T8 - 789 R / 826 W 4KiB Q32T1 - 291 R / 218 W 4KiB Q1T1 - 54 R / 110 W

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.

So I saw a lot of people complaining that these dont perform as well as they review. While there might be some bad batches, you also need to realize that hardware types will limit the total speed. If your device only supports PCIe 2.0, which has a rating of 500MB/S per channel, and 4x you would get 2000MB/S total. So you cant get the 3500MB/S advertised. Youd max out at 2000. PCIe 3.0 can do 1000MB/S per channel, so you could max out the device at around 3350MB/S (the title says 3500, but when you see the comparison chart in the details it is a little lower). It depends on the motherboard and CPU for what is supported. NEXT! I just put together an x570 / Ryzen 3900x build. The board has two slots, so I started out with the bottom slot to get it away from the GPU hoping to cut down on heat (I have a metal heatsink on it). However, when I fired up Crystal disk mark on a fresh windows 10 install I noticed the speeds were much lower than advertised. There isnt much on the internet about this, but I found when a board has two m.2 drives it typically splits the bandwidth up. 4 PCIe lans from the CPU go to the primary slot, and 4 PCIe lans from the Chipset go to the secondary. What I realized is when I ran the drive off the chipset-based slot, it got much lower rates. When I moved it to the main slot, it got what it was rated for. Then I changed the setting in CrystalDiskmark to NVMe mode, and it went up a little more. You can see my comparisons in the pictures. Yes it does matter which slot it is in. So, if you are getting lower than rated specs check your supported PCIe version and the slot itself. Always use the CPU-based slot for the best performance(it would seem).

I would have goven it five stars because the product arrived early which was great. It was easy to put in but, my laptop wouldnt recognize it. I ended up having to Format it before my laptop would recognize it as storage. I am happy with the drive it is working great now.

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.

Ive attached actual performance benchmarks from CrystalDiskMark in the images, both for a single drive and for the drives in RAID 0 configured as the boot volume. As you can see there is a slight boost for using RAID on sequential reads and a noticeable bump to writes. The drives installed easily, setting up RAID was a breeze thanks to ASUS/Intel RST. Windows 10 Pro installed smoothly and worked first time out. So, why not 5 stars? This model is listed as being supported by ADATAs SSD Toolbox software. This software is the only way to update the firmware and offers optimization, diagnostics and utilities that Id like to try out. In RAID 0 the drives arent recognized by the SSD Toolbox application. I contacted technical support who informed me the software would not work in conjunction with a RAID volume. This is understandable because the RAID controller is masking them into a single volume. I then wiped the RAID volume and re-installed Windows 10 onto a single drive, however, even when not combined into a RAID volume where the drives are independently recognized by the OS, the software still does not see the drives. I reached out to technical support again with screenshots demonstrating the issue and the response was to uninstall/reinstall the software. I did this, no joy. Interestingly, my Samsung SATA III SSDs were both recognized. They pointed out that there is not a firmware update needed currently but things may get complicated as time goes and updates come. As of this writing, no solution to get the software to recognize the drives under normal conditions. Im not satisfied by the support, as they seem to be dodging any actual assistance and e-mail responses take an entire day between steps/recommendations. Below is the system I have the drives installed in currently. Its a home productivity workstation and planned to be a gaming rig after some key upgrades down the road. Namely would like to replace the CPU with an i7-9700k and add an RTX 2080 Ti. 1x Asus ROG Maximus XI Hero Wi-Fi Z390 1x Intel Core i3-8100 Coffee Lake Quad-Core 3.6 GHz LGA 1151 300 Series 65W 1x Kingston Technology HyperX Fury Black 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 CL18 DIMM Memory (HX432C18FBK2/32) [Kit of 2 16GB Modules] 2x Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 PCIe M.2 2280 SSD [Intel RST RAID 0, Boot Drive] 1x Samsung 850 PRO 256GB 2.5 SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-7KE256BW) 1x Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM) 1x G-Technology 4TB G-Drive USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen 1) External Hard Drive (0G05666) 1x Corsair Carbide 275R Mid-Tower Gaming Case - Tempered Glass - Black (CC-9011132-WW) 1x Corsair AX1600i 1600W ATX 80 Plus Titanium Certified Full Modular Digital ATX Power Supply (CP-9020087-NA) 1x Windows 10 Professional

I’ve been running with this ssd as my operating system for a little over 2 years now I’d say and it still boots up in under 13 seconds. Also I just recently stress tested it to see the speed and it was only off by 150 or so! Really impressed with the price, definitely recommend if you only need it for a OS drive

This is my main drive for my computer and it works great. Easy to use and install.