From a sheer “SSD buzz” point of view, over the past year or so, 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) SSDs have receded into the background, while newer and faster PCI Express drives have dominated the headlines. Plenty of SATA SSDs still sell, of course; indeed, in greater volume than their PCI Express kin. It’s just that the juicy specs and the gaudiest performance numbers are all in PCI Express’ pantry now.

New PCI Express drives are about four times faster than their predecessors—in benchmark analyses, at least. (For many tasks, they’re hard to tell apart in real-world use, though.) Since these newer drives offer so much more raw performance than their SATA-based rivals, you’d think the entire world would have moved on, and nobody would be buying 2.5-inch SATA drives anymore. But not so, not so at all.

Just about all motherboards in existing desktop PCs and laptops out there have SATA ports and/or bays, while a relatively small number of them have M.2 slots, and only a subset of those support the PCI Express bus. So while SSDs in the M.2 form factor and using the PCI Express bus are definitely on the upswing (see our guide to the best M.2 SSDs), SATA SSDs of every shape and size still have plenty of life left in them.

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Unsexy it may be, but the 2.5-inch SATA SSD is far from dead, and companies are still devoting plenty of resources to this interface and drive type. Case in point: the new Ultimate SU900 from ADATA. This new SSD blends cutting-edge 3D flash technology with the reliable and widely compatible form factor of 2.5-inch SATA, making it the company’s top “non-gaming” SSD in its current lineup. (ADATA’s gaming gear is denoted by the ADATA “XPG” line.)

The challenge facing this ADATA drive: You can find SATA SSDs by the dozen at every capacity level, and just shop based on price on any given day. So why go for this model specifically? Let’s see what, if anything, sets the SU900 apart.

Design and Features

Since the Ultimate SU900 employs a, shall we say, “proven” formula, there’s not a whole lot of new technology to discuss here. But there is some that is new to ADATA.

The SU900 is the first drive we’ve seen from the company that uses 3D MLC NAND flash, which is essentially the pinnacle of current flash technology in consumer drives here in 2017. It differs from the previous general class of flash that was popular, known as planar. With 3D flash, the pieces of memory are stacked atop each other in a 3D structure, instead of being laid down side by side. As you can imagine, this takes up less space than the planar design. It reduces overall cost while also increasing endurance. It’s the way forward, and though this type of technology isn’t brand new, it’s the first drive we have tested from ADATA to use it.

In fact, 3D NAND has been around for a few years, as Samsung brought it to market first, and now other manufacturers are adopting it at their own paces. The most popular variety so far has been what is called TLC NAND, which uses three bits per cell to effect the data storage. The Ultimate SU900’s MLC NAND instead makes use of two bits per cell for greater reliability (reflected in the Ultimate SU900’s warranty length) and speed. (In contrast, its older ADATA Ultimate SU800 sibling is rocking TLC.) Generally speaking, TLC NAND drives are designed to offer value, whereas MLC drives are made for performance. That means the Ultimate SU900 is a higher-end SSD, packed with the latest technology.

As we mentioned above, Samsung was the first to market with this kind of memory, on its superb Samsung SSD 950 Pro. The rub is that this Samsung drive, and its successors the Samsung SSD 960 Pro and SSD 960 EVO, are PCI Express SSDs, as opposed to this SATA-based drive we’re looking at from ADATA. This makes those particular Samsung drives compatible with fewer laptops and desktops, but they do offer much higher performance, since they employ the faster PCI Express bus.

Despite this model being a SATA drive, ADATA has employed some technology tricks to help boost performance a bit. First, the SU900 has an “SLC cache” where it treats some empty portion of its flash memory like single-cell flash memory to help boost performance. (This is a common approach in today’s SSDs.) It has support for a DRAM buffer, as well, which works in similar fashion to Samsung’s Rapid Mode. This type of buffer can make benchmark runs look very good, though its benefits in the real world are modest at best.

The Ultimate SU900 uses a Silicon Motion (SMI) controller, and combined with its 3D NAND, that gives it maximum read/write specifications of 560MB per second and 525MB per second, respectively, near the maximum amounts possible on the SATA interface. These are pretty common specs, and mainstream SSDs have been able to achieve numbers like this for some time, which is why the industry as a whole has started to move to PCI Express. The SATA interface has been a hard ceiling for drives of this type, since it was designed for hard drives, not SSDs. That said, the numbers quoted by ADATA are just fine for 99 percent of consumers building/upgrading a PC or expanding the storage on a laptop, and we’ll be curious to see if the drive can hit these numbers in our benchmarks

Bundle and Capacities

The bundle that comes with the Ultimate SU900 is generous. It includes a 2mm spacer that allows it to be used in both 7mm- and 9.5mm-high laptop drive bays or enclosures, which is helpful for those looking to upgrade their laptop’s storage. (The spacer fills any extra vertical space, so that the drive does not flex or rattle in the bay.) It also includes a free software utility, ADATA’s SSD Toolbox.

SSD Toolbox is not going to win any design awards, but it’s full-featured and does everything we need it to do, so we have no complaints. You also get a serial number for Acronis True Image to help you clone your previous drive if you’re moving an OS installation to the new drive.

All in all, this bundle is solid, but at the same time, equal to what you get with most name-brand SSDs. It’s not lacking in any appreciable way, but really, it just sets ADATA on a level closer to the bigger players like Samsung, WD/SanDisk, and Micron/Crucial.

The Ultimate SU900 is available in a surprisingly wide array of capacities, stretching from 256GB all the way up to 2TB. However, as of press time, we could not find the 2TB drive for sale online yet. (ADATA reports that it should be out in the U.S. “soon,” with an MSRP of $1,099 and an estimated online selling price of about $999.) The drive we received for testing is the 512GB version, which was selling, when we wrote this in mid-June 2017, for an eyebrow-raising $220 to $230. That’s rather high at that capacity, as the competing 525GB version of the Crucial MX300 was just $159, and the 500GB version of the Samsung SSD 850 EVO was $169.

Still, the Ultimate SU900 is a performance-oriented drive and not necessarily a value-minded one, so we didn’t expect it to be a price aggressor. Also, it includes a long five-year warranty, so it’s technically not a direct competitor to more budget-friendly drives. Since most manufacturers are now using the M.2 platform for their highest-end drives, the SU900 will be competing with older SSDs such as the Kingston HyperX Savage and Corsair Neutron XTi. Let’s dig in and see how it does.

Performance Testing

Before we get started here, if you’re new to the world of solid-state drives, a few things are worth noting when it comes to performance.

For starters: If you’re upgrading from a standard spinning hard drive, any modern SSD will be a huge improvement, speeding up boot times and making programs launch faster. Most of today’s 2.5-inch SSDs make use of a specific interface, SATA 3.0 (also called “6Gbps SATA”), to achieve maximum speed versus older, but still common, SATA 2 ports, which top out at 300MB per second. We test all our SSDs on a SATA 3.0-equipped test-bed PC to show their full performance abilities. To get the most speed possible from modern drives, you’ll need a system with SATA 3.0 capability, as well.

If your system is based on a recent Intel chipset, later than those supporting 2nd-Generation “Sandy Bridge” processors (or one of the newer AMD chipsets), it has this interface. Be sure before buying, though. If your system is well-aged and doesn’t have SATA 3.0 support, there’s little point in paying a premium for a drive with the maximum possible performance. SATA 3.0-capable drives will work just fine with previous-generation SATA ports, and there’s scant reason to pay extra for drive speed that your system can’t take advantage of. Any basic current SSD will work just as well, in that SATA 3.0-less scenario.

AS-SSD (Sequential Read & Write Speeds)

This test uses the AS-SSD benchmark utility, which is designed to test SSDs, as opposed to traditional spinning hard drives. It measures a drive’s ability to read and write large files. Drive makers often quote these speeds, as a theoretical maximum, on the packaging or in advertising.

Sequential speeds are important if you’re working with very large files for image or video editing, or you play lots of games with large levels that take a long time to load with traditional hard drives. We secure-erase all SSDs before running this test.

Starting things off, we can see why the industry has moved on from the SATA interface; most of the drives here run close to the maximum speed allowed by the interface, which is just shy of 550MB per second once you factor in overhead. The SU900 threw down a very respectable 513MB per second, putting it in the upper half of drives in this competitive set. Then again, as we noted, this isn’t a unique achievement, since most of the SSDs here are quite close.

Here we start to see the drives separate a bit, as write operations are always a bit more of a challenge than read operations. In this grouping, the SU900 fared reasonably well, landing about mid-pack among its rivals with a performance of 476MB per second. Since AS-SSD is something of a stress test, this is a reasonably high score, as you can see from the chart. But again, most modern SSDs can manage to write somewhere in the mid 450MB-per-second region, putting the SU900 right in the thick of its competitors.

AS-SSD (4K Read & Write Speeds)

This test, also a part of the SSD-centric AS-SSD benchmark, measures a drive’s ability to traffic small files. Often overlooked, 4K performance, particularly 4K write performance, is important when it comes to boot speed and program launch times.

When booting up and launching programs, many tiny files get accessed and edited frequently. The faster your drive can write and read these kinds of files (especially dynamic link library, or DLL, files in Windows), the faster your OS will “feel.” Since small files like these get accessed much more frequently than large media or game-level files, a drive’s performance on this test will have a greater impact on how fast a drive feels in everyday use.

This test is known to put the hurt on an SSD, and the SU900 ended up on the slower end of the board with a score of 25.6MB per second. That’s roughly half the speed of the fastest drive in the group, the Zotac Premium Edition. That’s not a good showing, but to be fair to ADATA, most SSDs land in the 30MB-per-second or so range, so the SU900 isn’t terribly far off the mark here.

The SU900 redeemed itself somewhat in this demanding benchmark, landing right at the scoreboard’s center. It delivered a decent 100MB per second. The problem is, though, that it was right in line with value-oriented drives like the WD Blue SSD and Samsung SSD 750 EVO, and the SU900 is a performance-marketed drive with a price to match. The SU900 should be wiping the floor with these drives, but instead it’s running alongside them. That doesn’t bode well for ADATA’s drive, as its drive is more expensive and should be performing better than TLC-based drives in these demanding write tests. But let’s look on.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is, like AS-SSD, an SSD-specific set of drive-benchmarking tests. We’ll report here the Overall Score, which is derived from the Read and Write scores with the utility running at default settings. (That is, with 100 percent incompressible data.) The drive was secure-erased before the test was run.

In this all-encompassing benchmark, the SU900 landed in the lower region of the chart, which was again slightly disappointing. Its performance was similar to its rivals, but those are drives that came out a year or two ago, so it’s difficult for us to ascertain the advantages of the new technology this drive uses. It certainly doesn’t seem to be showing it in these benchmark results. The drive didn’t finish at the bottom of the chart, at least, but we expected more of a brand-new drive going up against drives from 2015 and 2016.

Crystal DiskMark (QD32 Testing)

Crystal DiskMark uses incompressible data for testing, which stresses most modern SSDs quite a bit since they rely on data compression to achieve their maximum level of performance. This particular test is designed to replicate the duties of an SSD located inside a Web server, as it’s asked to perform a smattering of small reads, 4K in size. While it’s reading these files, a queue of 32 outstanding requests is lined up (a “queue depth” 32 requests deep). That’s typical of a high-volume Web server, which has to fulfill requests coming in at the same time from various clients.

There’s no way to sugar-coat this result. The only drive the SU900 was able to beat was Toshiba’s entry-level drive, the Toshiba OCZ TL100. Every other drive laid the smackdown on the SU900 in this test, and even value drives like the Crucial MX300 outpaced it handily. That said, this is not a typical workload that you should be levying on a consumer-grade drive.

It seems the SU900 is better at writing than it is at reading, because it at least held its own in this grueling test. Though it didn’t top the charts, it ended up mid-pack, and even nipped at the 4TB version of the otherwise formidable Samsung SSD 850 EVO, long considered the benchmark SSD for all-around usage. That’s not too shabby, so clearly the SU900 has some ponies under the hood that emerge under the right circumstances.

PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test

Our last test is the PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test. This holistic trial simulates everyday drive accesses in a Windows environment.

In this test, the SU900 landed plumb in the middle of the pack, which is about where we’d expect it to finish given the results above, so all in all we’re satisfied with its results. Its score of 5,483 is just a few points shy of the 500GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO’s result, so it’s in good company. Its closest rival is the value-oriented WD Blue drive, though, which says more about that drive than the ADATA.

Conclusion

We’ve been hearing murmurs about a worldwide flash shortage, and it seems to be affecting this drive because it is expensive for what it delivers. When we wrote this, the 512GB version we tested was $219 on Amazon, while the 500GB version of the SSD 850 EVO was just $176. For most consumers, that price delta is just not going to fly, as there’s no compelling reason to choose the ADATA drive over the SSD 850 EVO if you have to pay that much more for it. Its performance is good enough for what it is but pedestrian, and since most SATA SSDs perform so similarly in the real world, the bottom-line price drives a lot of the purchasing decisions in this category.

This makes the SU900 a tough sell at the pricing when we reviewed it. It’s true, however, that the SU900 we tested was less expensive than the Samsung SSD 850 Pro, which was selling for $257 for the 512GB version at this writing. By that comparison, the SU900 actually looks like a fine deal, since it offers similar technology at a lower price. However, it makes less sense than ever to overpay for a SATA SSD when the price-to-performance ratio just doesn’t compute, at least in the real world where we all live and game. Paying a bunch of extra money for a few slivers more performance gains you nothing in the day-to-day.

It’s true that some buyers might not want an SSD with TLC NAND, so if you fall into that camp, you can rest easy with a drive like the SU900, since it uses time-tested MLC NAND flash. It is, indeed, a new drive with the latest technology, which adds to buyer confidence. Still, the market has settled into two strata now: PCI Express drives (mostly in the M.2 form factor) as the performance champions, and 2.5-inch drives being the value option. In that context, the SU900 is a bit too expensive for what it offers, to our eyes.

It’s a well-rounded package with fine extras, but if you really need a 2.5-inch SSD, the Samsung 850 EVO is still the drive to get. If the SU900 goes on sale, though, it could be a perfectly fine buy at some point. But for now, at least at 512GB, it’s just a bit too pricey to recommend at more than $200.