ADATA found itself in a bit of hot water in the world of internal solid-state drives (SSDs) last year, but that hasn’t stopped the company from forging on with its relentless SSD releases. Following on from the middling ADATA Falcon and Swordfish drives, ADATA’s XPG division is standing up to the plate with its latest offering, the XPG Gammix S50 Lite (starts at 1TB for $149.99; 2TB for $299.99, as tested). It’s a PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 drive that features just four channels (half of the eight-channel standard established by premium options in the space), so we weren’t expecting records to be shattered, especially not at this price. But it surprised us across most of the benchmark tests we run. The S50 Lite represents the first wave of PCIe 4.0’s “budget” set, and it fulfills that duty handily, earning our Editors’ Choice award as the best entry-level drive in the PCIe 4.0 class so far.
Gammix S50 Lite Specs: ADATA’s Back in the Budget Mix
The Gammix S50 Lite features Micron’s 96-layer 3D NAND flash, and Silicon Motion’s more budget-friendly four-lane SM2267 controller, making it the first four-lane PCIe 4.0 drive we’ve tested. The drive is launching with just two capacity options (1TB and 2TB), so anyone on the hunt for a lower- or higher-capacity M.2 drive should look elsewhere. (Check out our SSD dejargonizer to clarify those acronyms if you need the SSD terminology breakdown.)
As a niche class of product with an even more niche use case, PCIe 4.0 drives, with their sky-high sequential read and write scores, haven’t done a ton to justify their higher price points with the average customer. While those numbers are great for marketing departments to salivate over, they haven’t meant much for how most people actually use their computers on a day-to-day basis. The 4.0 spec being tied only to high-end, late-model AMD desktop motherboards has further dampened the pickup of these SSDs.
So perhaps that’s why we see the ADATA S50 Lite entering the PCIe 4.0 arena at such a drastically lower price than any other drives that have come before it. While options like the Seagate FireCuda 520 launched at a whopping 25 cents per gigabyte in the 2TB size tier, the Gammix S50 Lite breaks onto the scene for just 15 cents per gigabyte for both the 1TB and 2TB variants.
The M.2 2280 drive features a stylish and sleek heatsink that is glued to the single-sided drive with some serious sticky tape, as I found during PC Labs’ testing. While I don’t mind the aesthetics and the cooling power of the the included heatsink, I would have preferred to remove it and use our motherboard’s included cooling plates. This didn’t feel like an option with the S50 Lite, lest I accidentally rip one of the NAND cells off its solder in the process of removing the heatsink on top.
ADATA rates the 2TB drive we tested to hit a sequential read speed of up to 3,9000MBps, with sequential-write speeds topping out at 3,200MBps. As it is a budget drive, we don’t expect the S50 Lite to keep pace with speed freaks like the 7,000MBps (rated) Samsung SSD 980 Pro, nor should it, considering the price gulf (23 cents per gigabyte for the 1TB SSD 980 Pro) between the two drives at their respective size tiers.
On durability, the TBW (or “terabytes written”) rating is an estimate of the total amount of allowable lifetime write activity, after which the drive will start to take memory cells out of service as they “wear out.” ADATA’s bumped up expectations slightly here. While many 1TB PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested so far seem to top out somewhere around the 600TBW mark, ADATA rates the S50 Lite for up to 740TBW with a five-year warranty attached. Not a huge gain (and one that most users likely won’t notice), but a gain nonetheless.
ADATA’s full-featured, well-designed SSD Toolbox makes its return with the S50, providing a wide range of controls and health checks designed to help users manage their drive’s health over the years.
Testing the Gammix S50 Lite: Sequential Speeds Aren’t the Whole Ballgame
We test all of our PCI Express 4.0 SSDs on the MSI Godlike X570 motherboard, with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU installed. We use 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz, and the system employs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition as its discrete graphics card.
Meanwhile, our PCIe 3.0 SSDs are tested on our main storage testbed, which is built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU. We use the same RAM, clocked the same, and the same discrete graphics card. (Read much more about how we test SSDs and what the results mean.)
PCMark 10 Overall Storage Test
First up is the overall PCMark 10 storage test, from UL, running the full storage suite. This score represents how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run. It’s the sanctioned score presented by UL’s software at the end of each run. After that are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10’s background “traces.” These following PCMark 10-derived tests represent a simulation of how quickly a drive is capable of launching a particular program (or, in the first case, booting Windows 10). The Windows 10 trace simulates the full Windows 10 operating system startup procedure and records how quickly the drive can feed the kind of data requested.
After that is a game-launching test set, which simulates how quickly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages; 4K is one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations, though that composition does depend on the title you’re playing.
The drives are also put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to launch.
Finally, the PCMark 10 copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. At first, these numbers might look low compared with the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, charted further down. But that’s due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of (and differences between) the source data sets.
Depending on the test being run or the score being calculated, the S50 Lite trades blows with members of both the PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 crowd.
While its results in launching Adobe-based applications were considerably slower than expectations, it rebounded slightly with decent results in booting Windows 10 or various games (Battlefield 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4).
Copy tests were equally strong, though still well under some of the records set by other PCIe 4.0 drives like the TeamGroup Cardea Zero Z440. That drive, though, like the Samsung SSD 980 Pro and the Seagate FireCuda 520, sits in the ranks of the 20-cent-per-gigabyte (or higher) club, while the S50 Lite occupies the same price category as many competing PCIe 3.0 drives.
Sequential Speed and Copy Tests
Then, moving on from PCMark 10-derived numbers, the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.
Considering how well the ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite did in certain program launching tests, it’s not a surprise to see it also excel in Crystal DiskMark’s 4K random read and write tests.
The drive crashed in with some very strong results in AS-SSD’s copy tests, setting a new record for ISO copy speeds while putting options like the FireCuda 520 to shame in the Program and Game copy tests.
ADATA Still Rocks the Budget Segment
Despite the company not always living up to the standard that we’ve set for storage vendors, ADATA still knows how to put out a quality SSD, and the XPG Gammix S50 Lite is the latest and best evidence of that.
Even with the silicon-switching problems that have been reported on (and that we alluded to in our introduction), the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro remains, nearly two years after its initial launch, one of the best values in the PCIe 3.0 spec on price-to-performance ratio. Now, the XPG Gammix S50 Lite looks ready to take up that mantle for the PCIe 4.0 crowd, and it does so with solid results in game launching, Crystal DiskMark 4K, and AS-SSD copy tests.
Due to the company’s occasional history of changing out controllers at times, we can’t guarantee the chips you get inside a Gammix S50 Lite down the line will be exactly the same as what we tested here today.
But they should perform comparably, if ADATA’s response to that controversy holds. And strictly on the basis of the results we saw in our benchmarks, we can’t deny that the S50 Lite is a great option for budget-constrained PCIe 4.0 buyers. Its 4K random read and write performance was strong overall (save for a few steps behind in launching Adobe programs), and its AS-SSD copy test results kept it on pace with some of the heavier hitters we’ve tested. Combine that with a pretty, if tricky-to-remove, heatsink and a leading durability rating and warranty, and you’ve got the budget PCIe 4.0 drive to beat in the first half of 2021.
