The test system used in this review is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 memory, Samsung 960 PRO 512GB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise.
To test the performance of ADATA's Ultimate SU900 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Plextor S3C, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial M300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Kingston BX100, Samsung 850 EVO M.2, Samsung 850 EVO mSATA, AMD Radeon R7, Silicon Power Slim S80, Samsung SSD 850 EVO, OCZ ARC 100, SanDisk Ultra II, Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the Ultimate SU900 is based on SMI's SM2258 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 ADATA Ultimate SU900 256GB |
 Plextor S3C 256GB |
According to ADATA, the 256GB version of the SU900 is capable of reading at 550 MB/s and writing at 505 MB/s when tested with CrystalDiskMark. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in the sequential read and write tests.
 ADATA Ultimate SU900 - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 Plextor S3C 256GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The SU900 performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 559.8 MB/s and write at 507.3 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the Ultimate SU900's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the SU900 had average read and write speeds of 465.9 MB/s and 238.0 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 494.7 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, unlike most other MLC-based SSDs, the SU900 uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 400 MB/s and then drops to about 70 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the Ultimate SU900's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 ADATA Ultimate SU900 |
 Plextor S3C 256GB |
When tested with ATTO, the SU900's read speeds topped out at about 563 MB/s and its write speeds at 507 MB/s.
