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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Scour - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Yep, it makes no sense use PCIe 4.0 for a drive which is not fast enough to reach the PCIe 3.0-max speedsMrCommunistGen - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Most B550 boards have 2x M.2 slots, with the main slot being 4.0 and connected to the CPU and the second slot hanging off the chipset and limited to 3.0 speeds. So... plug it into the 2nd slot and leave the 1st slot for a higher performance 4.0 drive if you have one?X570 avoids this by having 4.0 lanes off of the chipset, so take your pick on which slot to plug it into. Probably wouldn't hurt to plug the higher performance drive into the CPU lanes.
Future buyers may get different hardware, but at least today based on the reviewed hardware and the price of the product this drive looks like it has pretty decent value.
In most of the tests it seems to rival the 970 EVO Plus which is a decent bit more expensive. After the SLC cache runs out, performance is definitely lower, but most average consumers aren't writing hundreds of GB of data at a time and should stay within the cache most of the time.
Nagorak - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
I wish the reviewers did a bit better job at explaining what the average person actually needs in terms of performance. Yes, they do all kinds of different tests which are admirable, but what does it mean in the end to the average user?Maybe the truth is that most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the fastest SSD on the market and a SATA SSD, so it literally doesn't matter.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
Techpowerup has a few real-world numbers that might be useful. Different model though.https://www.techpowerup.com/review/adata-xpg-gammi...
FunBunny2 - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
"Yep, it makes no sense use PCIe 4.0 for a drive which is not fast enough to reach the PCIe 3.0-max speeds"yeah, but... I'll bet lots o folks will gladly spend twice as much for a '5G' phone that can, at best, run sub-6 in a few locations and mmWave only in some sports arenas so they can watch the game they've paid a bunch to sit in the seat, on that phone. a fool and his money is soon parted.
utroz - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
The 2 advantages of using PCIe 4.0 x4 is that it can still get the same speed as a PCI-e 3.0 x4 on slots that support PCIe 4.0 x2 and if you use a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot you shouldn't loose much if any performance (just cause this drive is kinda slow for PCIe 4.0).ozark - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
The good ol' "Fool me once..."I was recommending the S8200 pro to several friends, even bought one myself around Thanksgiving last year. Turned out I got the "in-between" version with slightly lower performance. I wouldn't mind buying it at all if they were just honest with part switch since paying for $110 for above-average 1TB NVME SSD is still a pretty good deal.
No way I'll buy ADATA SSD again though...
FerroMagnetar - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
To this day I always try to buy MLC drives, though I know their days are numbered :(Nexing - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
At 2021 I am quite lost in this. Which MVME 1TB MLC drives, fast and below $150-200 exist?Thank you
crimson117 - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
"The pricing for the Gammix S50 Lite is unimpressive but also unsurprising"Actually I thought the pricing was one of the main things going for it. It's one of the cheaper good-performing 2TB NVME drives you can buy.
In your chart it's basically tied for second lowest price.