By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: ADATA Technology Corporation
Product Name: Premier SP610 Solid State Drive
Part Number: ASP610SS3-256GM-C (256GB)
UPC: 4713435799796
Price As Tested: $97.99 (Amazon | Newegg)

Full Disclosure: ADATA Technology Co. provided the product sample used in this article.

Founded in 2001, the Taiwanese company ADATA Technology Corporation specializes in memory-based products, selling everything from USB keys to flash memory cards to DRAM memory for desktop and server computers. A few years ago they branched out into SSDs, and have been competing aggressively on price/performance as SSD prices continue to fall. Today Benchmark Reviews has the opportunity to review their ADATA Premier SP610 256GB SSD.

No matter how fast your processor, memory, or video card is, your computer will still be limited by its slowest component: the hard disk. While hard disk speed has improved tremendously since the “early days”, with large caches and 10,000RPM spindle speeds, even the fastest hard disk’s performance is glacial compared to the rest of the computer. The situation only gets worse with modern pre-emptive multitasking operating systems, where dozens of threads are running simultaneously and competing for your disk’s limited response time and bandwith.

Consider: the average time to move a high-performance hard disk’s read/write head to a new track will be less than 10ms, which seems pretty fast. But your CPU is galloping along at billions of cycles per second, and will spend a significant amount of its time just waiting for the hard disk to fulfill its last request. Hard disk performance has plateued in the last few years, running up against the physical limitations of spindle speeds, magnetic media density, and head servomotor performance. At the end of the day, disks are limited by the fact that they’re comprised of physical, moving parts.

With no moving parts, Solid State Drive technology removes this bottleneck. The difference an SSD makes to operational response times and program speeds is dramatic: while a faster video card makes your games faster, and a faster processor makes compute-bound tasks faster, Solid State Drive technology makes your entire system faster, improving initial response times by more than 450x (45,000%) for applications and Operating System software, when compared to their mechanical HDD counterparts. The biggest mistake PC hardware enthusiasts make with regard to SSD technology is grading them based on bandwidth speed alone. File transfer speeds are important, but only so long as the operational I/O performance can sustain that bandwidth under load.

As we’ve explained in our SSD Benchmark Tests: SATA IDE vs AHCI Mode guide, Solid State Drive performance revolves around two dynamics: bandwidth speed (MB/s) and operational performance I/O per second (IOPS). These two metrics work together, but one may bemore important than the other. Consider this analogy: bandwidth determines how much cargo a ship can transport in one voyage, and operational IOPS performance is how fast that ship moves. By understanding this and applying it to SSD storage, there is a clear importance set on each variable depending on the task at hand.

For casual users, especially those with laptop or desktop computers that have been upgraded to use an SSD, the naturally quick response time is enough to automatically improve the user experience. Bandwidth speed is important, but only to the extent that operational performance meets the minimum needs of the system. If an SSD has a very high bandwidth speed but a low operational performance, it will take longer to load applications and boot the computer into Windows than if the SSD offered a higher IOPS performance.

Solid state storage devices have gained popularity with performance-minded consumers because they work equally well in PC, Linux, or Apple computer systems. Likewise, these drives install quite easily into both desktop and notebook platforms without any modification necessary. In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the 256GB ADATA Premier SP610 solid state drive.

ADATA has a broad range of SSD solutions available in 2.5″, m.2, and mSATA form factors. The drive we’re reviewing today is the 256MB version of their Premier SP610 series, a value line of drives available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities.

Premier SP610 drives are rated at 1.5 million hours MTBF and warranted for 3 years. The ADATA Premier SP610 is presently available online for $97.99 (Amazon | Newegg).

The SP610 256GB drive comes with a 2.5mm spacer for those installations requiring a 9.5mm thickness, and a quick start guide. On the back of the retail box is a QR code the buyer can scan to get a free copy of the Acronis True Image backup utility, which also allows users to easily migrate their systems to the new drive.

The ADATA Premier SP610 SSD is enclosed in a plain black metal chassis with a metallic sticker denoting the model and capacity. The back of the drive sports a label containing the drive’s model, capacity, and warranty code.

Standard 2.5″ mounting holes are tapped into the sides of the chassis, and a metallized security label obscures one of the screws you’d need to remove to take the drive apart. This drive is only 7mm thick, and you may need to use the included 2.5mm plastic spacer for some applications.

Opening the drive reveals a half-size PCB with 8 ADATA-branded flash memory chips (four per side), an SMI SN2246EN four-channel memory controller, and a Samsung 256MB DDR3 RAM chip for caching.

The reverse side of the board contains four more ADATA-branded flash memory chips.

With 256GB of synchronous multi-level NAND, ADATA specs this drive at 560MB/s read, 290MB/s write, and up to 75K iOPs. As you’d expect on any modern drive, TRIM and S.M.A.R.T. are fully supported, and BCH error-correcting code can handle up to 66 bit errors per kilobyte.

In the next few sections we’ll test the ADATA Premier SP610 SSD, and compare this solid state drive to other retail storage products intended for notebook and desktop installations.

Solid State Drives have traveled a long winding course to finally get where they are today. Up to this point in technology, there have been several key differences separating Solid State Drives from magnetic rotational Hard Disk Drives. While the DRAM-based buffer size on desktop HDDs has recently reached 64 MB and is ever-increasing, there is still a hefty delay in the initial response time. This is one key area in which flash-based Solid State Drives continually dominates because they lack moving parts to “get up to speed”.

When we test storage devices, the two main metrics to consider are access time and transfer rate. Simply put, access time is the time is takes the storage device to start delivering data once the request has been received, while transfer rate is how fast (megabytes per second) the data comes once the transfer operation begins. With a hard disk, data transfer cannot begin until the disk’s head servo physically moves the read/write head to the correct track. Although modern servos are very fast, in the best case you’re still looking at several milliseconds to do this, while an SSD’s access time is always under a millisecond. The disadvantage is even worse if the data isn’t all in a contiguous space on the disk, since the head will have to be repositioned on the fly, leading to more delays.

Early consumer SSDs actually had slower transfer rates than the best hard disks, although their instantaneous access times more than made up for it. The zenith of consumer hard disk performance was probably reached in 2012 with the release of the Western Digital Velociraptor 1 terabyte disk. Spinning at 10,000RPM, this disk could under ideal circumstances (i.e. a synthetic bandwidth test) reach a sequential transfer rate of over 230MB/s. Keep this figure in mind as you read this review.

Early on in our SSD coverage, Benchmark Reviews published an article which detailed Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing. The research and discussion that went into producing that article changed the way we now test SSD products. Our previous perceptions of this technology were lost on one particular difference: the wear leveling algorithm that makes data a moving target. Without conclusive linear bandwidth testing or some other method of total-capacity testing, our previous performance results were rough estimates at best.

Our test results were obtained after each SSD had been prepared using DISKPART or Sanitary Erase tools. As a word of caution, applications such as these offer immediate but temporary restoration of original ‘pristine’ performance levels. In our tests, we discovered that the maximum performance results (charted) would decay as subsequent tests were performed. SSDs attached to TRIM enabled Operating Systems will benefit from continuously refreshed performance, whereas older O/S’s will require a garbage collection (GC) tool to avoid ‘dirty NAND’ performance degradation.

It’s critically important to understand that no software for the Microsoft Windows platform can accurately measure SSD performance in a comparable fashion. Synthetic benchmark tools such as ATTO Disk Benchmark and Iometer are helpful indicators, but should not be considered the ultimate determining factor. That factor should be measured in actual user experience of real-world applications. Benchmark Reviews includes both bandwidth benchmarks and application speed tests to present a conclusive measurement of product performance.

Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 EVO (Intel P67 Sandy Bridge Platform, B3 Stepping)
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4 GHz Quad-Core CPU
System Memory: 4GB Dual-Channel DDR3 1600MHz CL6-6-6-18
SATA 6Gb/s Storage HBA: Integrated Intel P67 Controller
- AHCI mode – Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver 11.7.0.1013
SATA 3Gb/s Storage HBA: Integrated Intel P67 Controller
- AHCI mode – Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver 11.7.0.1013
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64-Bit with Service Pack 1

The following storage hardware has been used in our benchmark performance testing, and may be included in portions of this article:

AS SSD Benchmark 1.6.4067.34354: Multi-purpose speed and operational performance test
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46: Spot-tests static file size chunks for basic I/O bandwidth
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1a by Crystal Dew World: Sequential speed benchmark spot-tests various file size chunks
Iometer 1.1.0 (built 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation: Tests IOPS performance and I/O response time
Finalwire AIDA64: Disk Benchmark component tests linear read and write bandwidth speeds
Futuremark PCMark Vantage: HDD Benchmark Suite tests real-world drive performance

This article utilizes benchmark software tools to produce operational IOPS performance and bandwidth speed results. Each test was conducted in a specific fashion, and repeated for all products. These test results are not comparable to any other benchmark application, neither on this website or another, regardless of similar IOPS or MB/s terminology in the scores. The test results in this project are only intended to be compared to the other test results conducted in identical fashion for this article.

Alex Schepeljanski of Alex Intelligent Software develops the free AS SSD Benchmark utility for testing storage devices. The AS SSD Benchmark tests sequential read and write speeds, input/output operational performance, and response times.

AS-SSD Benchmark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds may be reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.

Beginning with sequential transfer performance, the 256GB Premier SP610 solid state drive produced speeds up to 509.06MB/s for reads and 285.35MB/s for writes. While the read speeds were among the highest we’ve ever tested, the write speeds lagged far behind. Single-threaded 4K IOPS performance tests delivered 26.68MB/s reads and 67.16MB/s writes, while the 64-thread 4K read test recorded 293.28MB/s with write performance at 254.11 MB/s.

256GB Premier SP610 SSD AS-SSD Results

The chart below summarizes AS-SSD 64-thread 4KB IOPS performance results among a variety of enthusiast-level SSDs. The ADATA SP610 turns in a little over half the read performance of the reigning champion, the Kingston HyperX Savage, but almost 90% of the write performance. The chart below is sorted by total combined performance, which helps illustrate which products offer the best operational input/output under load:

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests transfer rates using ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

256GB Premier SP610 SSD ATTO Benchmark Results

The 256GB model provided to Benchmark Reviews for testing produced 563 MBps maximum read speeds that plateau when the file size reaches about 256KB, and 302 MBps peak write bandwidth that plateaus starting at 8KB. Both of these numbers outperform ADATA’s specs for this drive, which are 560MB/s for reads and 290MB/s for writes. While the read speeds are among the very highest we’ve ever recorded, the write speeds are considerably lower, which make the results for this drive look a little lopsided when compared against other drives:

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests sequential performance using the CrystalDiskMark 3.0 software tool…

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth read and write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested, and all drives are formatted with NTFS on the Intel P67 chipset configured to use AHCI-mode. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

CrystalDiskMark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds are reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 reports sequential speeds reaching 525.3MB/s reads and 301.7 MB/s writes. 512K test results reached 384.6MB/s read and 304.2 MB/s write performance. 4K tests produced 29.59MB/s read and 87.87MB/s write performance. While the sequential read speeds were again very good, the 4K random transfer speeds with 32 commands queued up were mid-pack.

256GB Premier SP610 SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults

The chart below summarizes 4K random transfer speeds with a command queue depth of 32. While the ADATA Premier SP610 falls mid-pack in this chart, bear in mind that many of the drives below it are much older, previous-generation SSDs, so it’s really close to the bottom of the pack when considered against the currently-available competition. That said, most consumers are never going to have a situation where they’ve 32 outstanding I/O commands, so this test, while interesting from a performance perspective, isn’t that relevant for users that aren’t running servers.

In the next section, we continue our testing using Iometer to measure input/output performance…

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer does for a computer’s I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. Iometer was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and formerly known as “Galileo”. Intel has discontinued work on Iometer, and has gifted it to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). There is currently a new version of Iometer in beta form, which adds several new test dimensions for SSDs.

Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.

To measure random I/O response time as well as total I/O’s per second, Iometer is set to use 4KB file size chunks over a 100% random sequential distribution at a queue depth of 32 outstanding I/O’s per target. The tests are given a 50% read and 50% write distribution. While this pattern may not match traditional ‘server’ or ‘workstation’ profiles, it illustrates a single point of reference relative to our product field.

All of our SSD tests used Iometer 1.1.0 (build 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation to measure IOPS performance. Iometer isconfigured to use 32 outstanding I/O’s per target and random 50/50 read/write distributionconfiguration: 4KB 100 Random 50-50 Read and Write.icf. The chart below illustrates combined random read and write IOPS over a 120-second Iometer test phase, where highest I/O total is preferred:

The 256GB Samsung SSD 850 PRO produced ourall-time best recorded score with 94,985IOPS, leaving the OCZ Vector 150 (88,299 IOPS) and Vector 450 (87,323) SSDs that previously delivered the best combined IOPS performance tonearly 6000 IOPS behind the new leader. Trailing behind very closely is the 240GBSamsung SSD 850 EVO with 86,192 IOPS. OCZ’s Vertex 4 (83,494) and Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition (83,117) followedwith notable scores, before the Intel 520 SSD (80,433) and Intel 335 (80,015).

After the top-performing storage products, IOPS performance resultsquickly taper off. The ADATA Premier SP610, at 50,450 IOPS, ranks rather low in this chart, although it does much better than the Kingston HyperX Savage SSD that’s dominated many of the tests so far.

Nearly all modern SSDs deliver I/O far beyond the needs of multi-tasking power users and hardcore gamers; SSDs that return very high IOPS scores would be ideal for workstation systems running utilizing virtual machines.

In our next section, we test linear read and write bandwidth performance and compare the speed of the ADATA SSD against several other top storage products using the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark.

Many enthusiasts are familiar with the Finalwire AIDA64 benchmark suite, but very few are aware of the Disk Benchmark tool available inside the program. The AIDA64 Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, and can be configured to use file chunk sizes up to 1MB (which speeds up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform). Because of the full sector-by-sector nature of linear testing, Benchmark Reviews endorses this method for testing SSD products, as detailed in our Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing article. One of the advantages SSDs have over traditional spinning-platter hard disks is much more consistent bandwidth: hard disk bandwidth drops off as the capacity draws linear read/write speed down into the inner-portion of the disk platter. AIDA64 Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting.

Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools in my opinion, because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. Normally this isn’t an issue, but it has been shown that partition table alignment will occasionally play a role in overall SSD performance (HDDs don’t suffer this problem).

We run the AIDA64 linear read and write tests with a 1M block size. Charted above, read performance on the 256GB ADATA Premier SP610 SSD returned average speeds of 506.6MB/s.The read performance is remarkably consistent across the span of the device– with most SSDs, the line on the graph will have a fine sawtooth pattern.

AIDA64 linear write-to tests were next…

The write performance of the Premier SP610 SSD is not quite as consistent as the read performance; in particular, there are a couple of odd spikes at the very start of the test, where write performance drops to just below 180MB/s. However, the drive recovers well after that and turns in a fairly consistent, if relatively slow, average of 286.3MB/s.

The chart below shows the average linear read and write bandwidth speeds for a cross-section of storage devices tested with AIDA64. The ADATA SSD turns in very fast linear read speeds, only a couple of percent below the Kingston HyperX Savage, but drops far back with its relatively slow write speeds.

Linear tests are an important tool for comparing bandwidth speed between storage products, serve to highlight the consistent-bandwidth advantages of SSDs, which don’t suffer the performance drop-off that HDDs do as the test proceeds away from the fast outer edge of the disk.

In the next section we use PCMark Vantage to test real-world performance…

PCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows 7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use the HDD Test Suite to demonstrate simulated real-world storage drive performance in this article.

PCMark Vantage runs eight different storage benchmarks, each with a specific purpose. Once testing is complete, results are given a PCMark score while and detailed results indicate actual transaction speeds. The 256GB Premier SP610 SSD produced a total PCMark Vantage (secondary) HDD Test Suite score of 79525, the highest we’ve ever seen, with specific benchmark speeds reported below:

256GB ADATA Premier SP610 SSD PCMark VantageResults

With its combined score of 79,525, the ADATA Premier SP610 SSD jumps to the very top of the chart.

In the next section, I share my review conclusion and final product rating.

IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested which may differ from future versions. Benchmark Reviews begins our conclusion with a short summary for each of the areas that we rate.

The ADATA Premier SP610 256GB SSD turned in some excellent read performance results– in a couple of cases, such as the PCMark Vantage combined score– the highest we’ve seen. However, most consumer SSDs these days are bumping up against the bandwidth limitations of SATA 6G, and while it’s always satisfying to grab that last few percentage points, its score is not dramatically better than most of its competition. To get significantly better read performance, you’d need to bypass SATA entirely and go with a (much more expensive) PCI-E SSD.

Write performance is another story: although at 290MB/s (ATTO) it surpassed ADATA’s specification, it was much slower than most of the other recent SSDs we’ve tested, although some online research reveals that it’s in the same ballpark as the write performance of much of its competition, defined as “256GB drives in the $100 range.” The same goes for IOPS: at just over 54,000 IOPS per second, the SP610 256GB is among the slower SSDs we’ve tested…but remember that even the very best hard drives will have less than 1/100th of this IOPS performance.

That said, consumers and even enthusiasts should bear in mind that for desktop systems, read performance is much more important than write and IOPS performance– at least when both of the latter two are fast enough. The SP160 has better write performance than any physical hard drive short of a 15,000RPM SAS enterprise product, and no hard drive can come within an order of magnitude of its IOPS performance. What it boils down to is this: no matter what hard drive you’re running now, this is much, much faster.

Appearance doesn’t count for much in storage products: even if you have a windowed case, your drives probably are not visible. ADATA didn’t spend any time or money on the appearance of this drive, going with a flat black metal case and a simple sticker. It’s no better or worse looking than any other consumer SSD.

By their nature– no moving parts– SSDs are all but immune to physical shock. While early SSDs had relatively high failure rates, modern SSDs are proving to be very reliable, often far surpassing their specified write lifetimes. That said, the construction quality of the PCB and metal shell are excellent. ADATA backs this drive with a 3-year warranty, which is pretty standard in the consumer SSD market.

The 256GB ADATA Premier SP610 SSD is available for $99.99 ( Amazon | Newegg ), which comes in near the bottom of 256GB SSD prices. You can get a 256GB drive for $10 less if you shop around, but many 256GB drives come in at $10-$30 more. Oddly enough, ADATA’s own 256GB Premier SP920 drive, which is rated significantly better sequential write performance, is widely available for exactly the same price as the SP610– something to consider.

SSDs are becoming commodity items, and competition has led to “price compression” at the lower end of the market: in many cases an entire class of drives can fall within a $15 window. Today’s “best buy” can become tomorrow’s “overpriced”, so it always behooves the careful buyer to do their research and select the best product for them based on current price and availability.

All that said, as of the time of this review, the ADATA Premier SP610 256GB drive represents a good value. It’s priced competitively and for most enthusiasts its read performance more than makes up for its deficiencies in write and IOPS. The inclusion of a key to download a free copy of Acronis True Image makes migrating your entire Windows installation to this new drive easy, and the included spacer means you’ll be able to install it virtually anywhere any other 2.5″ device can fit. However, this drive doesn’t really stand out from the competition, and you should check the pricing and availability for ADATA’s own Premier Pro SP920 drive in the same capacity, which should provide superior write and IOPS performance and at the time of this review was available for the same $97.99 (Amazon | Newegg).

+ Chart-topping sequential read speeds
+ Supports TRIM, NCQ, S.M.A.R.T., and robust ECC
+ 3-Year product warranty support
+ Offered in 128/256/512/1024GB storage capacities
+ Lightweight compact storage solution
+ Resistant to extreme shock impact
+ Free copy of Acronis True Image included

– Sequential write and IOPS performance not as impressive
– Doesn’t stand out from competitive products
– Better performing ADATA drives available for the same price

Performance: 8.5
Appearance: 8.0
Construction: 9.50
Functionality: 9.00
Value: 8.5

Recommended: Benchmark Reviews Seal of Approval.

COMMENT QUESTION: Which brand of SSD do you trust most?

By David Ramsey

256GB Premier SP610 SSD AS-SSD Results

256GB Premier SP610 SSD ATTO Benchmark Results

256GB Premier SP610 SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults

256GB ADATA Premier SP610 SSD PCMark VantageResults

Recommended: Benchmark Reviews Seal of Approval.

By David Ramsey

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