ADATA XPG SX6000: Benchmarking A ~$50 USD 128GB NVMe SSD On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 15 January 2018 at 07:35 AM EST. Page 1 of 3. 6 Comments.

While solid-state drives have generally been quite reliable in recent years and even with all the benchmarking I put them through have had less than a handful fail out of dozens, whenever there's a bargain on NVMe SSDs, it's hard to resist. The speed of NVMe SSDs has generally been great and while it's not a key focus on Phoronix (and thus generally not receiving review samples of them), I upgrade some of the server room test systems when finding a deal. The latest is trying an ADATA XPG SX6000 NVMe SSD I managed to get for $49.99 USD.

The ADATA XPG SX6000 128GB version generally retails for about $60 USD, which even still is quite cheap compared to other NVMe SSDs with a ~128GB capacity. I've had various SATA 3.0 SSDs from ADATA over the years and have yet to one fail on me, but have not tested any of their NVMe M.2 SSDs up until now. When recently NewEgg was offering this NVMe SSD for $50, I decided to snatch one up for Linux benchmarking.

The ADATA XPG SX6000 series SSDs were only launched at the end of October. They make use of 3D TLC memory and the Realtek RTS5760 controller. ADATA advertises these drives as "entry-level enthusiast class" with the cheap price of the 128GB model but even the 512GB version can be found for less than $200 USD while the 1TB version is less than $400.

The 128GB version advertises sequential reads up to 730MB/s, sequential writes up to 660MB/s, random reads at 65K IOPS, and random writes at 110K IOPS. The larger capacity SX6000 series NVMe 1.2 SSDs are rated for 1000MB/s sequential reads, 800MB/s sequential writes, and 100~110K IOPS on random reads/writes. ADATA backs these entry-level NVMe SSDs with a five-year warranty and a 2,000,000 hour MTBF.

Disk Tests Linux 4.15 Git January

In my testing of the ADATA XPG SX6000 the past two weeks, it's been working out fine. No issues to speak of and the performance is good but understandably not as great as the higher-end solid-state drives. This drive has been working out fine with Ubuntu Linux. I tested this NVMe 1.2 M.2 SSD against a range of other NVMe and SATA 3.0 2.5-inch SSDs.


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