Continuing
its assault on the SSD market, ADATA has come out guns blazing with a brand-new
lineup of drives. The Premier Pro SP920 family of 6Gbps SATA SSDs has a little something
for everyone, in terms of capacity. Maybe you want a fleet-footed boot drive
and nothing more. Perhaps the kinds of files you want to store on your new SSD
is “all of them.” With capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and big ol’ 1TB, the
Premier Pro SP920 family has you covered. We split the difference and called
the 256GB model into the station for questioning.
The ADATA Premier Pro SP920 2.5” SATA SSD is
specifically designed to meet the needs
of multimedia professionals looking for high-performance capabilities with
large file transfers, such as massive videos files
The 256GB
SP920 certainly has an impressive rap sheet. Previous ADATA SSDs relied on
SandForce silicon for their storage controllers, but the controller under the
hood of the SP920 is Marvell’s 88SS9189. Like the SSD itself, this controller
is new, shiny, and laden with tasty treats. We know you care deeply about performance,
and the Marvell 88SS9189 has
plenty. Sequential reads and writes peak at 560MBps and 360MBps, respectively,
while random 4K reads and writes can top out at an obscene 96,000 IOPS/80,000
IOPS. Better still, our test results showed that it makes no difference to this
controller whether a particular workload is com- pressible or not.
Though the 9.5mm form factor is still more widely
used, the SP920 has the much slimmer 7mm profile, allowing it to fit in
Ultrabooks or in most any other application. The corners are slightly rounded
out with standard SATA power and data connectors located on the front of the
drive
Marvell’s
controller also gives you NCQ, TRIM, and S.M.A.R.T. support, as it should, and
it also has a hardware- based AES-256 encryption engine. ADATA fills this drive
with synchronous MLC NAND, set up in eight channels. Although the SP920 is a
slender 7mm thick, ADATA includes a spacer to fatten it up for 9.5mm bays. And
because we’re all special little snowflakes, ADATA gifts every SP920 with a
product key for Acronis True Image HD. (We found ours under the drive itself.)
The ADATA Premier Pro SP920’s design looks
virtually nothing like its predecessor, the SP900. Additionally, it now sports
ADATA's multi-colored humming bird right beside the ADATA logo.
As our benchmark
results show, the SP920 is a burner. What it won’t do, though, is burn up your
budget; you can have the 256GB drive for about 62 cents a gig. That’s hot.
|
Specifications:
·
Sequential
read/write (advertised): 560MBps/360MBps;
·
Max
4K random read/write (advertised, Iometer): 96,000
·
IOPS/80,000
IOPS;
·
Interface:
6Gbps SATA;
·
Warranty:
3 years
|
