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 SX8200 Pro 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 Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD Black NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO, Crucial MX500, Plextor M8V, Samsung T5, Crucial BX300, ADATA Ultimate SU900, Plextor S3C, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C and Crucial MX300.
As I mentioned earlier, the XPG SX8200 Pro is based on SMI's SM2262EN 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 XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB |
 Samsung 970 PRO 512GB |
According to ADATA, the 512GB version of the SX8200 Pro is capable of reading at 3,500 MB/s and writing at 2,300 MB/s when tested with CrystalDiskMark. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
 ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 Samsung 970 PRO 512GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The SX8200 Pro performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 3,517 MB/s and write at 2,309 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the SX8200 Pro'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 SX8200 Pro had average read and write speeds of 1631.8 MB/s and 606.4 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 1190.3 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the SX8200 Pro uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 1,500 MB/s and then drops to about 550 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache. Oddly enough, the SX8200 Pro's write performance dropped yet again about 2/3 of the way through the test.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the SX8200 Pro'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 XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB |
 Samsung 970 PRO 512GB |
When tested with ATTO, the SX8200 Pro's read speeds topped out at about 3,338 MB/s and its write speeds at 2,259 MB/s.
