Final Thoughts
ADATA has really made a statement with this drive compared to the XPG SX8000 that was released a year earlier. They have done the right thing to give consumers incredibly fast performance, and more importantly the type of performance that actually matters. You have some amazing random read performance, and for the most part when you are using your PC you are reading data not writing it.
The ADATA XPG SX8200 scored 3152.2 MB/s read and 1734.1 MB/s write in CrystalDiskMark, which is very close to its advertised speeds of 3200 MB/s read and 1700 MB/s write. In AS SSD the drive achieved 329K IOPS read and 286K IOPS write in the 4K random performance test, which is actually over the 310K / 280K rated IOPS for the drive.
The only thing that this drive has a hard time with is sequential write tests, as all drives that use TLC NAND do. During the AIDA64 Linear Write test the drive performance drops off to around 350-550 MB/s once the SLC cache is exhausted. This happens about 33% through the drive or around 140 GB written. As we mentioned this drive is all about the performance that matters and I don’t see many users sequentially writing 140GB of data.
One last thing I wanted to point out about this drive is that ADATA did not pre-install the heatspreader. I like this as many motherboards come with integrated M.2 heatspreaders and it is just annoying to having to pull the stock one off.
Now down to price, you can pickup the 480GB version of this drive for $199.99, at that price you are paying around $0.41 per GB and with the performance you really can’t complain. ADATA also backs this drive up with a 5-year warranty. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive a 10 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Such a great improvement over the SX8000
– Amazing random read performance
– 5-year warranty
– Heatspreader does not come attached
– Price
Cons:
– None that I found
