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With the price of large capacity Solid State Drives dropping throughout 2014, we felt it was a good time to take a look at the 512GB version of the ADATA SP610. This drive is equipped with the excellent Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller and has dropped in price to around the £170 inc vat mark. Should you be shortlisting this drive for a new system build before the end of the year?
ADATA's SP610 was created with performance in mind – but at a competitive price point. With drives such as the Samsung 840 EVO dominating the budget sector, it is difficult for smaller brand names such as ADATA to get any kind of traction, especially in the UK market. This hasn't been helped by a poor marketing plan and scarce availability.
The SP610 is available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities. You may struggle to find stores stocking the SP610 at all, but we have seen it at prices close to £170 inc vat.
Performance overview:
128GB Performance (ATTO)
Read : Up to 560MB/s
Write : Up to 150MB/s
Maximum 4K read/write IOPS up to 66K/35K
256GB Performance (ATTO)
Read : Up to 560MB/s
Write : Up to 290MB/s
Maximum 4K read/write IOPS up to 75K/67K
512GB Performance (ATTO)
Read : Up to 560MB/s
Write : Up to 450MB/s
Maximum 4K read/write IOPS up to 73K/72K
1TB Performance (ATTO)
Read : Up to 560MB/s
Write : Up to 450MB/s
Maximum 4K read/write IOPS up to 73K/72K
The figures above, are the official ADATA claims, found on their website HERE. We can see that if you want the maximum performance then you need to budget for the 512GB or 1TB capacity drives. The 256GB model will suffer write performance degradation to 290MB/s, and the write performance of the 128GB model drops even further to 150MB/s. By 2014 standards this is rather weak indeed.
The ADATA SP610 512GB SSD arrives in a plain white box with the drive on full view, behind a protective plastic cover.
Further details are evident on the rear of the packaging.
The bundle includes a 7mm to 9mm drive holder, literature on the product, mounting screws and a copy of Acronis HD 2013.
The colourful ADATA bird takes pride of place on the edge of the sticker, with the company name and drive capacity visible. Details of the unit, warranty code etc is shown on the rear of the chassis.
This is a ‘half length' PCB screwed into the standard 2.5 inch drive chassis, as shown above. The Silicon Motion (SMI) SM2246EN four channel SATA 3 controller is visible, alongside a single module of NANYA 256MB DDR3 DRAM cache memory. 512GB of Micron 20nm Synchronous MLC NAND memory is installed on the PCB – with four modules on each side.
On this page we present some high resolution images of the product in our studio. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Kitguru Test Rig 3
Other Drives
Apotop S3C 256GB
Angelbird 512GB wrk
Hynix SH920/910A
OCZ ARC 100 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Intel 520 Series 240GB
Intel 730 240GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
OCZ Vector 150 256GB
OCZ Vector 240GB
OCZ Vertex 450 256GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (1.4 fw)
ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB
Intel 730 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SDD
SanDisk Extreme II 240GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
OCZ Agility 4 256GB
SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS
ADATA S510 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (fw 1.13)
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
4K QD32 performance is reasonably good, however outclassed by many of the leading drives in 2014. Sequential performance is excellent, peaking at around 520 MB/s read and 450 MB/s write.
The four channel Silicon Motion (SMI) SM2246EN controller handles incompressible and compressible data in equal measure – always good to see.
Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Read performance is very strong, hitting 561MB/s – which is close to the limit of the SATA 3 interface. Write performance is slightly less impressive at 445 MB/s. Realistically you are unlikely to notice much difference in the real world between 550MB/s and 450MB/s.
Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD deals exclusively with incompressible data and the Silicon Motion (SMI) SM2246EN four channel controller shows reasonable strength -with a final score of 935 points.
Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.
Our own results are very closely matched against the official ADATA claims, scoring between 71,000 and 72,000 IOPS.
The ADATA SP610 512GB is very capable and while not outstanding in any key area it does offer great value for money when factoring in the overall performance characteristics of the drive.
This isn't the first time we have looked at the Silicon Motion (SMI) SM2246EN four channel controller and there is no doubt it performs well in a variety of situations, including when called upon to deal with both incompressible and compressible data workloads.
When we compare the SP610 512GB to other high performance drives available today, it performs well, but it does not dominate any of the benchmarks, sometimes resting mid table, below market leaders.
There is no doubt it will make an excellent foundation for a new system build, but there are so many competitors today that we feel the SP610 will get missed by many in a final purchasing decision.
Much of the problem that ADATA still face is availability and basic brand awareness. They have yet to really effectively target the enthusiast audience, and we rarely see our readers discussing their products in open channels on our social media or forums.
The SP610 512GB Solid State drive for instance is not available in the United Kingdom through the usual channels such as Overclockers UK or SCAN, but we did find it at lesser known etailer Alternate in the UK for £172 inc vat. This it is a very competitive price point, even if compared against reader favourites such as Samsung's 500GB 840 EVO – which is retailing for around the £185 inc vat mark.
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Pros:
- compressible and incompressible equally strong.
- 4k random IOPS rates quite well.
- sequential read performance close to real world limits of SATA 3 interface.
- very competitively priced.
Cons:
- UK availability is poor.
- 128GB and 256GB versions suffer from weak sequential write performance.
- stiff competition in this sector.
Kitguru says: The ADATA SP610 512GB is a good all round Solid State Drive, but availability and brand awareness still plague ADATA in the UK.
