ADATA Premier Pro SP900 (0-provison) 128GB Solid State Drive Review

ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB

Storage as a part of computer system has not changed much over the span of time after the invention of mechanical disks.
Things really took a turn for good when the flash based SSD’s became mainstream in the late 2000’s.Although the price/GB was huge the speed was well worth it.
From that time it was always a matter of tradeoffs between price and performance.
Today we have one such mainstream SSD’s in our lab : ADATA Premier Pro SP 900 .

We have a few nifty features in this SSD which needs to be talked about and we will talk about them after we check out the specifications.

Read on..

Specifications and availability

lets take a look at the specification and features.

The “0 provision” stands for the fact that Adata has decided to cut the over provisioning space of the SSD’s down to nothing in place of the regular 7% or more which is made possible by the new firmware from sand force released last year.

The drive is available in 64GB/128GB/256GB capacities and are priced at around 4000 for the 64GB to 10500 fir the 256GB one.

Showcase
lets have a look at the drive.

On the front we see the capacity size and the model name.

On the back is where you will find the model number, ASP900S3-128GM, the warranty code and SKU. The Acronis True Image key is also listed on the back of the drive( a nifty feature since keys are something thats gets lost very often,at-least for this humble reviewer)the contents of the box are minimal : 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter,a manual.

Test Setup and ATTO baseline performance

ATTO Baseline Performance

One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files. This gives an opportunity to test with various file sizes.

This benchmark is a preferred among manufacturers as ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb with a ques depth of 4.

The SSD performed as advertised in the ATTO benchmark putting in some impressive numbers of 526MB/s write and 556MB/sec read. putting this disk in the range of OCZ Agility and previously reviewed Gskill Phoenix.

Crystal Diskmark and Anvil professional benchmark

Crystal Diskmark

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data. Crystal DiskMark scores usually drop a bit when comparing to ATTO and this is the result of the testing data now being primarily incompressible representing movies, music and photographs.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

Anvil’s Storage Utilities was designed to give you a simple mean to measure the read and write performance of your SSD. The benchmark tool helps you monitor and check the response time of your unit as well as view the system information collected using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

this concludes the benchmarks.

Final Words

I will just list out the Pro’s and Con’s

Pro’s|

1. Price:The drive is priced at around 6k depending on the retailer which is priced accordingly.The only other Drive beating it at price/GB is the Sandisk while giving a lot less performance.
2. The package although somewhat frugal included an 3.5″ adapter which is kinda absent in any other SSD’s at this price range.

Con’s

1. The Zero provision although a nice concept is not very effective,the drive(in fact any ssd) tends to get slower when filled up to the max capacity.
2. Availability is an issue as the drive is rarely available in the streets,which is in fact a source of concern as the performance is not that bad compared to some other drives.

Overall a nice package only marred by the availability issues at this moment.

A 6.5/10 from me and the OCF team.