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 XPG SX8200 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 Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Crucial MX500, Plextor M8V, Crucial BX300, ADATA Ultimate SU900, Plextor S3C, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial MX300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180 and Samsung SSD 850 EVO.
As I mentioned earlier, the XPG SX8200 is based on SMI's SM2262 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 240GB |
 Plextor M9Pe 256GB |
According to ADATA, the 240GB version of the SX8200 is capable of reading at 3,200 MB/s and writing at 1,100 MB/s when tested with CrystalDiskMark. While the drive had no problems reaching its rated write speed, it came up a bit short in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read speed test.
 ADATA XPG SX8200 240GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 Plextor M9Pe 256GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The SX8200 performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 3,178 MB/s and write at 1,204 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the SX8200'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 had average read and write speeds of 1634.9 MB/s and 467.2 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 1478.5 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the SX8200 uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 1,100 MB/s and then drops to about 200 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 SX8200'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 240GB |
 Plextor M9Pe 256GB |
When tested with ATTO, the SX8200's read speeds topped out at about 3,056 MB/s and its write speeds at 1,220 MB/s.
