Conclusion
Performance of the ADATA SP900 Premiere Pro SSD was better than expected. The move to 0% over provisioning has not hurt the drive in terms of performance as much as expected although it does have an effect. How this will effect longevity remains to be seen, but the press release from LSI seems to state that NAND is STILL being used for over provisioning, it has just come in the form of the binary/decimal offset. Whatever the secret sauce users are now able to get an extra 7% of usable space on their SSDs when using a SandForce revision 5 drive.
Just like before keeping a drive free of space keeps performance up to expectations. Filling the drive up, reduces performance drastically. This is not new to any drive, just worth repeating. The fill point that reduces performance was not gauged, but at over 2/3rds full write performance did take a hit in our fill tests, performing in certain benchmarks as poorly as dirty state tests. In clean performance the drive managed to rival some very much more expensive SSDs in certain tests.
The inclusion of a 3.5” desktop adapter, and Acronis disk migration software with the drive and still selling for less than $1 per GB is a great thing to see. An SSD is the single greatest tangible performance upgrade one can make in a PC whether it be laptop or desktop. Making excellent performance drives affordable is a great way of breathing new life into older systems and a must have for any new builds a user has planned for the future.
Overall the SP900 gets a TechREACTION silver award for price availability, performance, features and data density. Write performance has increased to near synchronous NAND speeds, but the lack of over provisioning has dropped fill/dirty performance lower than we would like. Future firmware updates from SandForce and hopefully passed through ADATA are expected to resolve this issue.
For more information about ADATA product please visit their website.
