ADATA XPG SX300 SATA 6Gb/s mSATA SSD Review

Testing Procedure and Testing Results

Software:

Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.3b – Standard settings used. Test run with compressible and incompressible data
ATTO Disk Benchmark – Default settings used.
I/O Meter – based on Micron’s recommended documentation for testing SSDs. A custom I/O meter test is used. The 4 Kb aligned data request size was used. The test was run for a total of 50 iterations with 5 minutes of run time per iteration. Screenshot were taken after all the iterations had completed.

 Crystal DiskMark

ADATA XPG SX300	Kingston HyperX 3K

Both drives are neck in neck. The ADATA XPG SX300 takes a slight lead. The Kingston HyperX 3K uses the same controller as the SX300, however it is slightly older. 4K performance is very good on both drives.

ADATA XPG SX300	Kingston HyperX 3K

In the compressible data test, the transfer rates are closer to the advertised speeds listed on the box.

ATTO Disk benchmark

	Kingston HyperX 3K

In the ATTO benchmark Kingston takes the lead in the transfer rate battle. The fastest speed attained by the Kingston HyperX 3K drive is 492.28 MB/S write speed and  530.17 MB/S read speed. The ADATA XPG SX300 comes in at 484.33 MB/S write speed and  536.20 MB/S read speed.

I/O Meter

ADATA XPG SX300	Kingston HyperX 3K

I/O Meter is designed to benchmark the I/O of each of the drives. I/O is the operations per second (reads and writes) to the hard drive. We use 4K random reads and writes at 32 QD to simulate small reads and writes to the hard drive. The small reads and writes could be cookies, logs, or web page history. A good I/O of a drive is  essential for fast performance. To set up the test, we used this best practices guide from Micron. However, we only used 50 iterations per test.

The Kingston HyperX 3K lead the test with an I/O of 24107 IOPS and the ADATA XPG SX300 comes in at 20810 IOPS.

ADATA XPG SX300	Kingston HyperX 3K

The same holds true for the write I/O. The Kingston HyperX 3K comes closer to the listed specification at 72776 IOPS and the ADATA XPG SX300 scores 60835 IOPS

I am not looking to get the numbers listed in the specifications, but in the range. These numbers were created in a lab and tweaked. The test numbers listed in the specifications may not represent real world performance.

One thing that I would like to point out, is the ADATA SX300 is using an adapter and without a motherboard that would recognize the ADATA XPG SX300 I cannot say the adapter has not hurt I/O performance somewhat.

PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark

The storage scores show the Kingston HyperX 3K takes a very slight lead over the ADATA XPG SX300.

The bandwidth test shows less than a 7 MB/S difference between the drives. I seriously doubt that a person could tell the difference in using their PC with these numbers.

The applications testing in PCMark 8 is designed to emulate real life usage and there is no longer a difference between the two drives. Almost every score is identical.