Available in both 2.5 and M2 forms, the ADATA SU800 is the brand’s first SSD to make use of 3D NAND tech. If you know anything about SSDs you would know that creating a model with 3D NAND is challenging. The results of 3D NAND are sometimes a miss and the tech is not something companies favour to use. If you don’t know, 3D NAND is a flash memory that is used in SSDs, hard drives and even the iPhone 6 and up uses it for its storage. It is basically tech that allows for the stacking of memory cells to increase storage density. The stacks can go high and instead of them being spread out across a board, the stacks allow for a much higher density on each block.
A few years ago 3D NAND was only found in a few devices and SSDs have only started to include it in the design. The SU800 has the write speed of 520 MB/s for the 256GB model I received. With 3D NAND and a decent storage, the ADATA SU800 was the best thing for my gaming. I already use a Samsung EVO 850 on my PC so that is already a breeze. The ability to install another SSD into it just for games made me very happy, as what better way to run games that from a super-fast storage medium. While there is not much I can say in detail without comparing a couple of SSDs, I only had one, the ADATA SU800 was fast and reliable.
First I had to benchmark the SSD. For the test, I used AS SSD Benchmark and the results were as expected. The Samsung EVO 850 beat the ADATA SU800 256GB in some cases while in others the ADATA did very well. The SSD promises 560MB/s of read speed and 520MB/s of write speeds and it delivered on one front. While the speeds were not 100% accurate to the promise, they were close enough.
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To put it into perspective, a standard hard drive has an average of 110MB/s read and write speeds so you are looking at 5 times the speed when it comes to an ADATA SU800 SSD. SSDs also use much less power as the SU800 uses 0.65w compared to a standard HDD that uses 3.2w. Just goes to show that if you are in the market for a green machine then an SSD is the way to go as the power consumption is next to nothing. It also makes for a great option for laptops if you are thinking about upgrading your HDD to an SSD as it will greatly improve your battery life too.
Benchmarks aside, the ADATA runs pretty well for an SSD and of course, I had to test out the gaming side of it all. Load times were absolutely lightning fast and the initial boot up of games increased. As much as this helped, remember that it is a 256 GB SSD, so space could be an issue if you are downloading your entire library of games. However, I normally stick to one PC game at a time so space was not an issue for me.
ADATA’s new 3D NAND tech is great and without a doubt something to look out for when purchasing a new SSD. It is one small step for speed one giant step for SSD technology. However, it still has a few issues to iron out in terms of benchmark performance. Saying that however, it makes for a decent entry-level SSD if you are not worried about a few MB less speed than that of the Samsung EVO models. Not that the few MB/s matter in the long run anyway. You can pick up the ADATA SU800 SSD starting at R1035 for the 128GB and R1800 for the 256GB.
This review was based on the 256GB model given to us for a period of two weeks.
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