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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Dizoja86 - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
I was also confused about that. The price seems fair for the performance.Dizoja86 - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
Really hoping to see that S70 review soon. From the SSD recommendations for this month, it sounds like it's in the works.Billy Tallis - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
I'm currently wrapping up testing of the most recent Innogrit firmware available. Over the weekend I'll be re-testing the 980 PRO with Samsung's newest firmware. Once those tests are complete, I plan to write up my Phison E18 review first, then the ADATA S70.Scour - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
Would be nice :)Dug - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
From looking at others like storage review, I wouldn't even be looking at that drive.Nexing - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
'we had originally speculated that the SM2267 controller might allow the S50 Lite to be the first Gen4 SSD suitable for laptop usage (hoping for similar power efficiency to the SK hynix Gold P31)'What about?
Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD Extreme Performance Solid State Drive (SB-RKT4P-1TB)
Billy Tallis - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
The Rocket 4 Plus is a Phison E18 drive. That's an 8-channel controller designed for maximum performance. That kind of goal usually leads to mediocre power efficiency at best. And our testing shows that the E18 doesn't even have great efficiency among current top of the line Gen4 controllers. For example, an E18 drive against the WD Black SN850 loses in all but one of the efficiency scores: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2783?vs=27...And against the SK hynix Gold P31, the E18 drive loses very badly on efficiency, with the P31 typically getting somewhere around 3x better performance per Watt: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2783?vs=27...
You might be able to run an E18 drive in a laptop, but the extra performance isn't going to make anything feel noticeably faster, and if you have a heavy storage workload that might come close to making use of the drive's theoretical performance, then its poor efficiency will start to have an impact on battery life.
Scour - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
I think thermal throttling in laptops could be a big problem if using high performance NVME-SSDsTheinsanegamerN - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
Well duh.Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
laptops have one big issue, thermal performance, and we have seen let's just call "optimistic" ways of cooling down our silicon chips there will always be problems with thermals and desktops will always be faster just because of thermals period simple as that, I do realize this is very like probably not right in the sense desktops will always outperform laptops but for the foreseeable future, I believe it to be true.