At a Glance: Adata XPG SX6000 Pro Review

Adata’s XPG SX6000 Pro SSDs were designed to offer exceptional performance at an exceedingly low price point. As these SSDs are built as budget-oriented products, they aren’t able to compete with the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market in terms of performance. But their substantially lower price may make the XPG SX6000 Pro series SSDs ($149.99, as tested for 1TB) the better solution for many system builders.

Design & Features

Adata offers the XPG SX6000 Pro in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities that offer similar performance and features. These drives were built using 2nd gen 3D TLC NAND and Realtek’s RTS5763DL high-performance controller that is also used on Adata’s faster XPG SX7100 SSDs. All of these drives have a maximum read speed of 2,100MB/s, a 2,000,000 hour MTBF rating, and an attachable heatsink for motherboards that don’t have 0built-in heatsinks over the M.2 slots.

These SSDs are single-sided with all functional hardware located on one side of the PCB, and they also lack DRAM. The SSD supports the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology inherent in NVMe 1.3 to utilize the system’s RAM as memory for the SSD to help compensate for the lack of RAM on the SSD itself, but the lack of onboard memory will still hamper performance somewhat.

Write performance differs slightly between these SSDs with the 256GB model writing data at a max speed of 1,200MB/s and the two higher capacity drives writing data at up to 1,500MB/s, and these higher capacity drives also feature better random IOPS performance.

Benchmarks

Our sister-site PCMag ran one of Adata’s XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSDs through a marathon of performance benchmarks that returned satisfying if unsurprising results. The SX6000 Pro was tested against Adata’s higher-end Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB as well as Crucial’s P1 500GB and WD’s SN500 500GB.

In the first test, PCMark 8’s realistic everyday use storage benchmark, all of the drives came in a virtual tie. Subsequent tests using Crystal DiskMark 6.0 with the SX8200 Pro pulling into a clear lead with the SX6000 Pro and Crucial P1 vying for second place.

In the sequential read/write test the SX6000 Pro managed a clean win over the Crucial P1, but the situation was reversed in 4K read/write performance. This is likely due to the Crucial P1’s built-in RAM, which gives it an advantage over DRAMless solutions like the SX6000 Pro when reading or writing short bursts of data.

Turning next to AS-SSD’s file transfer tests, we once again see the Crucial P1 hold the number two spot in PCMag’s charts, but the performance difference between it and the SX6000 is relatively small in this case.

Conclusion

Taken together, these tests show quite conclusively that the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB is faster than the other three drives, and it’s also clear that the WD Blue is significantly slower than the competition. Based on the data available, however, I can’t decisively say which is better between the Crucial P1 and the XPG SX6000 Pro. They trade places in our performance charts and both series of SSDs are priced competitively against each other.

At this very moment, I’d give a small edge to the Adata XPG SX6000 Pro because it includes a heat shield, and it’s currently on sale with a substantial discount and a 20 percent off coupon that drops the price on the 1TB model to $86.39. This is a temporary state of affairs, but as the two drives come so close to each other in performance, your best option will be to simply buy whichever is the least expensive between the SX6000 and the Crucial P1 at the time you are shopping. Either that or opt for something with more performance like the SX8200.

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