Budget PCIe Gen 4 SSD? ADATA XPG S50 Lite Review

Action Mechanism of Kamagra Jelly : Kamagra oral jelly you won’t just feel like a man again however will additionally enhance your future discount cialis canada sexual coexistence significantly. I am right now, on Medicare, and between my Medicare payments, and the deductions they take from my Social Security for support payments, and my drug plan, I am now paying more money for the drug that is available at affordable price. online purchase viagra works similarly as branded medicine. They’ll make sure the expert panel of surgeons who perform in the uk viagra online state of the art infrastructure. We all know these three popular medications are prescribed for other health conditions and they have been quite successful. uk viagra sales

ADATA’s new PCIe Gen 4 drive, the S50 Lite, has me confused out my mind. It’s a 1 or 2TB drive, with a silicon motion gen 4 controller, DDR4 and SLC caches, costs a tad more than a Sabrent Rocket 4 – but barely beats a good gen 3 drive in performance. Yeah, I’m stumped. Lets take a look at it and see if we can work out why it exists. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

Starting with the specs, this is a TLC drive, with around 15% of it’s space as an SLC cache, although it varies depending on how full it is. I actually ended up seeing the faster cached write speeds up to around 100GB written on this 1TB model, making for about 10% cached on an otherwise empty drive. It’s got DDR4 onboard too, and uses an SM2267 controller which is a ‘budget oriented’ gen 4 controller. It only offers a maximum of 3.9GB/s reads and a max of 3.5GB/s writes, although in practice the S50 didn’t get close to that.

The drive itself comes with a thin metal heat spreader glued on, which coupled with a bit of airflow actually does a good job at keeping the drive below the 75°c thermal throttling point. It’s also double-sided, with the 1TB model having 2 flash chips back there, all ADATA branded too. Otherwise, it’s a standard size at 2280, installs normally, although you will want to use it with an AMD B550 or X570 motherboard, and Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series CPU to actually get Gen 4 speeds at least for now.

So, that’s the drive, what about performance? Well, the synthetic tests show that in a best case scenario, testing 1MB blocks at a queue depth of 4, you’ll see 3.8GB/s on reads, and 3.2GB/s on writes. That’s a bit off the maximum the controller can offer, and a more pessimistic test like AS SSD reckons it’s more like 3.4GB/s on sequential reads and 2.95GB/s on sequential writes. Random performance is a lot lower. For the more difficult transfers, pretty much all the gen 4 drives I’ve tested so far don’t out-perform good gen 3 drives by all that much, and that’s the same here.

In my file transfer stress test, duplicating files on the drive to stress reads and writes simultaneously, it fared pretty well. Well over 1GB/s is a great result here, but sadly that’s only thanks to the SLC caching, as once I hit around 100GB of writes, the speed crashed off a cliff. It varied between 200MB/s and 800MB/s – averaging around 380 throughout the next 150GB of transfer. The next 350GB were even slower – with the last 100GB transferring at just 250MB/s average. Not great.

In reality, you don’t often write over 100GB at full NVME speed to a drive. Even installing games you will be more limited by your internet and CPU decode speed, rather than the drive itself, so for the average user this will be just fine. Even if you do hammer it, it didn’t peak above 65°c for me, sitting above the GPU with a bit of airflow over it – if it’s trapped under your GPU it may be a bit warmer but still shouldn’t throttle.

All of that still doesn’t really explain why this drive actually… exists. It’s a gen 4 drive that is barely faster than a gen 3 one, but costs as much as the early ‘proper’ gen 4 drives like this Sabrent. If it cost more like £150 for this 1TB model I could more easily get behind it, but with such a slim margin over the much more widely available, and cheaper gen 3 drives, it still doesn’t make all that much sense to me. With that said, it’s not a bad drive, and if you can get it on sale there is no reason to not pick one up, but at MSRP I’d probably give it a pass personally.