ADATA Premier Pro SP920SS vs. Crucial M550 - Battle of the Mainstream SSDs Round 2
Two of the Same?
We have seen an increase in the number of new mainstream SSDs lately. This has been made possible by Micron’s new 128Gbit NAND, which has helped to bring costs down, making them more attractive to users who only require an SSD for mainstream, everyday computing purposes.
For many users, 256GB (or 240GB) is the magic sweet spot capacity point for SSDs. There are two main reasons for this: one, it is at a more palatable price point for a reasonable sized capacity; and two, NAND parallelism ensures that at 256GB, there are enough NAND dies to go around to maximize the performance of the memory controller. To understand NAND parallelism, we need to know that one of the reasons why SSDs are so much faster than traditional hard disk drives is that apart from the fact that there are no moving parts, SSDs can read and write to multiple NAND dies almost simultaneously. Understanding this, we can see that as long as the memory controller is capable, having additional NAND dies usually translates to better performance.
However, one of the problems of using high density memory packages for 256GB capacity SSDs is that when you double the capacity of the die, it also means that you need lesser dies to make up the required 256GB capacity. As a result, there would not be enough NAND dies to maximize the performance potential of the memory controller, leading to a performance degradation. And this was exactly what happened to the Crucial M500.
To rectify this, Crucial introduced the new M550. For the M550, Crucial has reverted to 64Gbit NAND for its 128GB and 256GB drives to improve performance, while its 512GB and 1TB models continue to use 128Gbit NAND - the sheer capacity of the larger capacity drives necessitates more dies and thus saturates the channels of the memory controller.
In addition, the new Crucial M550 also has the updated Marvell 88SS9189 controller, which is an incremental update over the older 88SS9187, adding support for LPDDR and improved DevSleep optimization, both of which are power-saving features.
Another new mainstream SSD to hit the market recently is ADATA’s Premier Pro SP920SS (which will be referred to simply as the SP920SS from here on). The name ADATA might not ring any bells, but Taiwanese-based ADATA is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of DRAM modules and have recently added SSDs in their product portfolio. In fact, we reviewed ADATA’s previous flagship - the XPG SX900 - in our inaugural Great High-end SSD Shootout.
Like the Crucial M550, the ADATA SP920SS is also equipped with Marvell’s new 88SS9189, and it is also one of the first brands outside of Crucial to use Micron’s new 128Gbit NAND. Upon further investigation, we also noticed that the ADATA SP920SS’ firmware has the exact same codename as the Crucial M550 - MU1. In light of this, we have every reason to believe that the ADATA SP920SS is in fact a rebranded M550.
However, unlike the M550, the SP920SS series will use Micron’s new 128Gbit NAND across all models, and this would result in lower performance for the lower capacity 128GB and 256GB drives. As explained earlier, higher density NAND reduces the number of NAND dies used, which in turns reduces performance as as a result of decreased NAND parallelism. How this will impact performance will be interesting to see.
Test Setup
The drives will be tested on our recently revamped storage testbed. The main changes are the faster Core i5-2500K processor and an accompanying Z77 motherboard which has native Thunderbolt connectivity.
Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
Windows 7
We have also revised our benchmarks, ditching older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also including an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance.
The list of benchmarks used are as follows:
AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)
Since the ADATA SP920SS looks to be a rebrand of the Crucial M550 but with 128GBit NAND instead of 64Gbit NAND, it will be interesting to see how NAND parallelism affects performance. We have also included results of the older Crucial M500 to see how much of an improvement the newer Marvell controller and the switch to 64Gbit NAND will have. Finally, we also want to see how these new drives will against Samsung’s extremely competent and capable SSD 840 EVO, which is shaping up to the be the mainstream SSD of choice for most users.
Here is the full list of drives compared:
ADATA Premier Pro SP920SS
Crucial M550
Crucial M500
Samsung SSD 840 EVO
Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Plextor M5 Pro Extreme
OCZ Vector 150
Timing Tests
New to our evaluation of SSDs is how they perform in real world everyday situations, namely booting up from a cold start, reboot and launching applications. As for the applications used, we made the drives launch 11 applications from the Adobe CS6 suite of utilities simultaneously, which includes resource intensive applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro amongst others. As a point of reference, a 7200rpm mechanical hard disk would take over 5 minutes to open all the applications.
Looking at the timing tests, we can see that the new Crucial M550 is marginally quicker than the older Crucial M500. It seems then that the switch to lower density 64Gbit NAND and the new Marvell controller and firmware has had a positive effect. The Crucial M550 was also appreciably quicker than the ADATA SP920SS. Both drives also recorded significantly better boot and reboot timings than the Samsung SSD 840 EVO, although the Samsung drive later redeemed itself with a faster application launch time. Finally, we noted that top tier drives like the Samsung SSD 840 Pro, OCZ Vector 150 and Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme were on an entire different level of performance.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results
CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data.
Moving on the CrystalDiskMark, the first thing we noticed was that the ADATA SP920SS’ sequential write performance was significantly poorer than the Crucial M550, to the tune of around 26%. This was exhibited in the 512k workloads, where its write performance was again around 25% lesser than that of the Crucial M550. That said, the two drives were almost on a par when we looked at their performance in handling smaller 4k data blocks. Again, we can see that the top tier SSDs offer better and more consistent performance across all workloads.
AS SSD 1.7.4739 Results
AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using controllers such as the SandForce SF-2281 cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of their strong advantages and help us score it more evenly against other drives.
Beginning with AS SSD’s copy benchmark, which simulates the copying of three different file and data types, we can see that apart from copying an ISO file, the ADATA SP920SS was appreciably slower than the Crucial M550. And if we were to look at its performance in the sequential read and write workload, we can see again that its write performance was about 28% slower than the Crucial M550, and is in fact quite comparable to the older Crucial M500, which also uses 128Gbit NAND. Performance on the 4k and 4k, 64 threads workloads were much improved and although the Crucial M550 recorded better results, the difference was not all that great.
What is also interesting to note was that the Samsung SSD 840 EVO were quicker than both the ADATA and Crucial drives across all but the 4k, 64 threads workload, where its performance dipped significantly, suggesting that its TurboWrite cache was exhausted.
PCMark 7 Results
PCMark 7 is a benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.
The ADATA SP920SS performed disappointingly on PCMark 7 and scored about 9% less than the Crucial M550. It was also the only drive to record a score of below 5000. Even the Crucial M500, which also uses 128Gbit NAND, managed a score of 5247, which was a good 8% better. Amongst the mainstream SSDs, the Samsung SSD 840 EVO led the way, whereas its big brother, the Samsung SSD 840 Pro, was the top performer on this benchmark.
Iometer Results (Part 1)
Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face.
On Iometer, the performance of both the ADATA SP920SS and Crucial M550 were pretty comparable, with the exception of the 64k streaming writes workload where the ADATA SP920SS did predictably worse. Even so, we noticed that its 64k streaming writes performance was significantly better than that of the older Crucial M500, which also uses 128Gbit NAND. Overall, performance of both the ADATA SP920SS and Crucial M550 was pretty commendable, but the top tier drives showed their worth with their overall better performance and consistency.
Iometer Results (Part 2)
Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. Looking at response times, we can see the ADATA SP920SS has below average response times on the 64k streaming writes workload, which explains its poor performance. When it came to 64k streaming reads, all the drives recorded very similar response times and also IOPs on the previous page.
Mainstream Royal Rumble
As we have mentioned in our previous of the Crucial M500 and Samsung SSD 840 EVO, there are two schools of thoughts with regards as to the future of SSDs. While Samsung believe that TLC NAND coupled with advanced caching technologies is the way to go to increase performance and capacity while bringing down costs; Crucial is adamant that that smaller manufacturing processes coupled with larger page and block sizes is the way forwards.
With the new M550, it seems that Crucial has somewhat retracted their earlier stance, recognizing that its older 64Gbit NAND still has a role to play, especially when it comes to performance of lower capacity drives. This is confirmed when you look at the results of the benchmarks in the earlier pages, the Crucial M550 rectifies the weak write performance of the earlier M500, especially on sequential and 512k workloads; and it is indeed faster overall.
Even so, despite the improved performance, it faces stiff competition from the Samsung SSD 840 EVO. The two drives are mostly evenly matched, with the Samsung drive holding a slight edge up until higher queue depth workloads where it exhausts its TurboWrite cache and the Crucial drive takes the lead. However, the SSD 840 EVO still has a trick up its sleeves and that is its RAPID caching technology, which tremendously boosts performance.
On the other hand, the ADATA SP920SS was somewhat disappointing. Despite possessing many of the same ingredients that make up the Crucial M550, we found its write performance, especially on sequential and 512k workloads, was exceptionally poor and was at a level below that of even the older Crucial M500, which also uses 128Gbit NAND. This is quite puzzling considering it uses the same controller and firmware as the Crucial M550, we can only hazard a guess that Crucial kept the best NAND dies for itself, leaving the poorer ones for others.
In terms of pricing, the ADATA SP920SS comes in at S$235 for 256GB, which is a good deal below the S$1 per gigabyte magic mark and is slightly cheaper than the Crucial M550, which comes in at S$240. While the difference in price is slight, what the ADATA SP920SS also has going for it is that comes with 3.5-inch HDD adapter, which could come in useful especially if you are using an older computer chassis with no provisions for 2.5-inch form factor drives. It also comes with Acronis True Image HD for easy hard drive migration. In terms of accessories, the Crucial M550 only comes with a 9.5mm spacer. Both drives are backed by 3-year warranties.
To sum up, the ADATA SP920SS is arguably the better buy if you are on a shoestring budget as its lower price and accompanying accessories (should you require them) represents greater savings over the Crucial M550. That said, the Crucial M550 is an extremely competent mainstream SSD and offers performance that is much improved over the older Crucial M500 and is almost on a par with the more expensive Samsung SSD 840 EVO (S$269).
