The ADATA GAMMIX S50 Lite 2TB SSD Review: Mainstream PCIe Gen4

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

Our AnandTech Storage Bench tests are traces (recordings) of real-world IO patterns that are replayed onto the drives under test. The Destroyer is the longest and most difficult phase of our consumer SSD test suite. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.

Average Data Rate
Average Latency	Average Read Latency	Average Write Latency
99th Percentile Latency	99th Percentile Read Latency	99th Percentile Write Latency
Energy Usage

On The Destroyer, ADATA's S50 Lite offers similar overall performance to good PCIe Gen3 drives and the early Gen4 drives based on the Phison E16 controller. The power consumption is also similar to the Phison E16 drives, which is a bit disappointing since the S50 Lite's SM2267 controller is just a four-channel design, which should save a bit of power.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy

The ATSB Heavy test is much shorter overall than The Destroyer, but is still fairly write-intensive. We run this test twice: first on a mostly-empty drive, and again on a completely full drive to show the worst-case performance.

Average Data Rate
Average Latency	Average Read Latency	Average Write Latency
99th Percentile Latency	99th Percentile Read Latency	99th Percentile Write Latency
Energy Usage

As with The Destroyer, we see the S50 Lite's performance on the Heavy test falling in the same general range as the top PCIe Gen3 drives, and it is clearly slower than top of the line Gen4 drives. The S50 Lite also has somewhat disappointing performance on the full-drive test runs, with higher write latencies than we'd like to see from a TLC drive. Power efficiency continues to be poor, though it is within the normal range for high-performance drives.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

The ATSB Light test represents ordinary everyday usage that doesn't put much strain on a SSD. Low queue depths, short bursts of IO and a short overall test duration mean this should be easy for any SSD. But running it a second time on a full drive shows how even storage-light workloads can be affected by SSD performance degradation.

Average Data Rate
Average Latency	Average Read Latency	Average Write Latency
99th Percentile Latency	99th Percentile Read Latency	99th Percentile Write Latency
Energy Usage

On the Light test, the S50 Lite appropriately does well, with slightly better overall performance than any of the PCIe Gen3 drives, and decent full-drive performance with no concerning latency scores.

PCMark 10 Storage Benchmarks

The PCMark 10 Storage benchmarks are IO trace based tests similar to our own ATSB tests. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.

Full System Drive	Overall Score	Average Bandwidth	Average Latency
Quick System Drive	Overall Score	Average Bandwidth	Average Latency
Data Drive	Overall Score	Average Bandwidth	Average Latency

The ADATA S50 Lite underperforms on all three of the PCMark 10 Storage tests. The most important comparison here is probably the Intel 670p, which uses basically the same controller and theoretically inferior QLC NAND. But the 670p's firmware is tuned so that it gets the most benefit out of its SLC cache on all three of these tests, which clearly isn't happening for the S50 Lite.