The ADATA GAMMIX S50 Lite 2TB SSD Review: Mainstream PCIe Gen4
by Billy Tallis on April 30, 2021 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech 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.
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| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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Tomatotech - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Which is better, TLC or SLC?SLC of course!
Any decent QLC drive will operate in SLC mode for as long as it can (e.g an empty 4TB QLC drive has 1TB of SLC space, and a half-full 4TB QLC drive will have around 500GB of TLC space). So you can rest easy, they’re even better than your precious TLC drives.
FunBunny2 - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
"QLC drive will operate in SLC mode"many times the 'experts' here at AT have asserted that 'SLC mode' by xLC NAND just ain't like 'real' SLC. don't recall how large the falloff is, but it exists.
sonny73n - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
"Any decent QLC drive will operate in SLC mode for as long as it can (e.g an empty 4TB QLC drive has 1TB of SLC space,"How many QLC drive can operate in SLC mode? But hey, I'm paying for 4TB, I expect to have a full 4TB of reasonable quality NAND, not 4TB of crappy NAND and hoping it would work well if I use only 1/4 of its capacity.
sonny73n - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
"So you can rest easy, they’re even better than your precious TLC drives."Stop spreading misinformation! Internet have enough fake news already.
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
"So you can rest easy, they’re even better than your precious TLC drives"Imagine thinking the above line justifies your technology being "good". You can take your condescending attitude and shove it. Nobody buys a drive to use a quarter of its capacity just to try to keep speeds up to previous generation tech just to pay as much as said previous gen tech. Unless QLC brings 2TB NVMe drives under $100 it's worthless to most consumers.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
let's just admit that nand is nand and it's honestly pretty great, do we need something new yes, was that intel 3d x-point, possibly but according to them no, so we are gonna have to deal with cheaper higher capacity SSD's for a while as long as I can still get an SLC/MLC/TLC SSD for my boot drive I don't care about having my games on qlc or whatever comes after and as long as OEM for laptops dont use qlc or later for boot drives im fine with it.FunBunny2 - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
"as long as OEM for laptops dont use qlc or later for boot drives im fine with it."whose going to stop them from putting QLC or whatever the next xLC is called in your laptop? the FTC? not even Biden's cabal has the stones to do that.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
yeah I agree, not that any president would care about nand but anyway if it does happen which it will, I know i can probably buy a 120gb model and just buy a tlc or lower drive either way and flip the 120gb or something maybe put it into an HPC machine something like that.Linustechtips12#6900xt - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
HTPC*eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
So, do I get this correctly? Basically a waste of perfectly good PCIe4 channels? I guess if you have plenty, not so bad, but otherwise, not really.