The ADATA GAMMIX S50 Lite 2TB SSD Review: Mainstream PCIe Gen4
by Billy Tallis on April 30, 2021 8:00 AM ESTConclusion
The ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite is the first SSD of its kind: a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD aimed at the mid-range mainstream segment of the consumer SSD market. Most Gen4 SSDs on the market were designed to go after the high end space, though the earliest such examples have now effectively been pushed down to mid-range by the arrival of a second wave of even faster Gen4 drives. By aiming for a more mainstream (and less expensive) role, the S50 Lite doesn't even try to make full use of the bandwidth offered by PCIe Gen4, and at its best it can only use a little bit of the extra speed over PCIe Gen3.
In fact, the S50 Lite is best understood by almost completely ignoring the fact that it supports PCIe Gen4; that feature can be viewed as simply a side-effect of the S50 Lite being a fairly modern design, so of course it should support the current IO standards. At heart, the S50 Lite is designed to be an affordable mainstream drive with the same general performance that required a high-end drive two or three years ago.
The S50 Lite is built around Silicon Motion's SM2267, their first PCIe Gen4 controller and the smaller, cheaper member of what is planned to be a broader family of Gen4 SSD controllers. We had originally hoped that SM2267 would allow drives like the S50 Lite to follow in the footsteps of the SK hynix Gold P31, bringing the benefits of a thoroughly modern 4-channel NVMe SSD to a broader audience. But the SM2267 only gets halfway there: it provides most of the performance we expect from a high-end 8-channel Gen3 drive, but since it's still a 28nm part we don't see the astounding power efficiency advantages that SK hynix delivered.
The S50 Lite also doesn't include the full amount of DRAM that high-end NVMe drives use, which hurts its performance on some heavier workloads. But that's more acceptable these days, since users with such workloads should be moving on to today's high-end Gen4 drives. (Side note: if ADATA is equipping the 1TB model with the same 1GB of DRAM that our 2TB sample gets, then the 1TB model probably avoids some of these performance pitfalls.) The result is that the SM2267 controller should be seen more as a reduced-cost replacement for the SM2262 family, and drives like the S50 Lite are aiming for a slightly lower market position than something like the SK hynix Gold P31.
Given the choice between the S50 Lite's nominal support for PCIe Gen4, or a well-rounded Gen3 drive, the answer is clear. Gen4 support on its own does not make a drive better, and there are plenty for Gen3 drives that offer better real-world performance and efficiency than the S50 Lite. In addition to the relative paucity of DRAM, the S50 Lite also suffers from small SLC cache sizes when the drive is mostly full. The fact that the S50 Lite supports a PCIe Gen4 host interface is almost completely irrelevant: at best it's barely able to exceed Gen3 performance, and it's unlikely to be used in systems providing a Gen4 x2 slot (which are likely to use even cheaper SSDs). It's good to see that SMI can ship a Gen4-capable controller, but the high-end SM2264 controller that we're still waiting for is the one that actually needs the Gen4 interface.
| 480-512 GB | 960 GB-1 TB | 2 TB | |
| ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite Gen3, 4ch TLC |
$139.99 (14¢/GB) |
$235.99 (12¢/GB) |
|
| Inland Premium Gen3, TLC |
$62.99 (12¢/GB) |
$114.99 (11¢/GB) |
$236.99 (12¢/GB) |
| Mushkin Pilot-E Gen3, TLC |
$67.99 (14¢/GB) |
$114.99 (11¢/GB) |
$219.99 (11¢/GB) |
| Samsung 970 EVO Plus Gen3, TLC |
$79.99 (16¢/GB) |
$164.99 (16¢/GB) |
$310.05 (16¢/GB) |
| SK hynix Gold P31 PCIe Gen3, 4ch TLC |
$74.99 (15¢/GB) |
$134.99 (13¢/GB) |
|
| WD Black SN750 Gen3, TLC |
$69.99 (14¢/GB) |
$144.80 (14¢/GB) |
$309.99 (15¢/GB) |
| High-End PCIe Gen4: | |||
| ADATA XPG Gammix S70 | $179.99 (18¢/GB) |
$329.99 (16¢/GB) |
|
| Silicon Power US70 | $159.99 (16¢/GB) |
$319.99 (16¢/GB) |
|
| Samsung 980 PRO | $129.99 (26¢/GB) |
$199.99 (20¢/GB) |
|
| Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus | $199.98 (20¢/GB) |
$399.98 (20¢/GB) |
|
| WD Black SN850 | $129.99 (26¢/GB) |
$199.99 (20¢/GB) |
$379.99 (19¢/GB) |
The pricing for the Gammix S50 Lite is unimpressive but also unsurprising. The drive has a bit of bling and can advertise PCIe Gen4 support, so it ends up priced close to the Gen3 drives from top-tier brands like SK hynix and WD, though with less of a premium on the 2TB capacity. It is at least clearly cheaper than the high-end Gen4 drives with 8-channel controllers, even the older Phison E16 models. Still, there are dozens of brands selling Phison E12S or SM2262EN-based Gen3 drives that will have equivalent or better real-world performance to the S50 Lite, but are more affordable. The cheapest of those models come with shorter 3-year warranties, which may not be worth the savings to some consumers.
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FunBunny2 - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
"every dollar spent on QLC is a dollar not spent on TLC -- nor MLC."it's been ages since I looked, but I'd wager that not even Enterprise RDBMS Storage Appliances are built with SLC any more. where did it all go? :)
Oxford Guy - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
SLC is an extreme example for most workloads. MLC is a far more enlightening one for consumers, as is the transition from planar to 3D TLC.Wereweeb - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
That is not economies of scale, that is market share. What you want is not to make TLC cheaper, but to boycott QLC.I wouldn't have disagreed with you when QLC came out. But right now I'd consider it good enough for most consumers, regardless of it being technically inferior to TLC.
The truth is, there just isn't any real world difference in performance between modern SSD's when it comes to the tasks a typical consumer faces. Only gamers and workstations benefit from TLC, and while it's natural to want to prevent it from becoming a "Luxury product" like MLC did, I think that there will always be demand for SSD's with higher endurance and throughput than QLC.
If you want to spread awareness about the negative aspects of QLC, do it intelligently, instead of acting like a conspiracy theory weirdo.
Wereweeb - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
Actually, to correct myself: there are SSD's that are objectively bad and should be banished from this dimension, they're called DRAMless SATA SSD's. But thankfully, that issue has already has been sorted out by history.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
That exact same argument was sued for MLC when TLC came out, and we all saw what happened to MLC.QLC is "cheaper" and more importantly has far less endurance then TLC. Built in obsolescence. It's a horrible product for consumers, slower then TLC, especially when the drive fills up, and isnt noticeably cheaper for th econsumer then TLC is.
QLC is garbage, and outside of extreme capacity drives like sabarent's rocket q 8TB, makes no sense.
Wereweeb - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
A 2TB TLC SSD's warranty can cover for 667 Gigabites of writes per day for 5 years. Which consumer will exceed that? Chia miners? How much data have you written into your computer today?The existing MLC capacity has merely been redirected to enterprise consumers, who actually DO need to entirely rewrite their SSD's daily. And for those cases there's also Optane and the new low-latency SLC (Z-NAND).
Give QLC SSD's some dedicated SLC + a tiering software and it beats TLC drives in endurance. The Enmotus FuzeDrive P200 does exactly that and ot has an endurance of 3,600 TBW, or 1 DWPD. Two to three times the warrantied endurance of your typical TLC drive.
That's the future we're headed towards. QLC for bulk storage, tiered with SLC or an NVRAM (Optane or competitor) for hot storage.
Plus, IIRC there is a 8TB QLC SSD that refuses to fold data from the SLC cache into QLC until it *needs to*, so if you fill less than 2TB of data it essentially behaves like a pSLC SSD. You might have to ask NewMaxx for the details (And to fact-check me) tho.
Wereweeb - Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - link
Plus, the warrantied storage is typically VERY conservative, and is only supposed to stop the enterprise people from buying the cheaper and lower-binned consumer SSD's.So I expect that in most consumer workloads the FuzeDrive is going to roughly match the endurance of TLC, which itself is more than sufficient for your typical consumer to use for over 10 years - at which point the SSD will either have failed from other problems, or be old outdated garbage that might not even fit in a modern computer.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
I expect the Zip drive and the Deathstar hard drive from IBM.The Zip drive was a massive market success despite being an extremely shoddy and unreliable design. It should be unbelievable (and isn't) that a product that bad was allowed to become so common.
Expect the worst. Companies are in business to 'sell less for more'. If they could sell you an old boot fished out of a toxic lake rather than a computer, for the same money, they would -- in a New York minute.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
When you end up with bits of tech that are better than half-baked trash like the Zip drive then be pleasantly surprised. Don't be surprised when tech like the Zip drives gives you the click of death. Inadequate product quality is one of the results of inadequate regulation.GeoffreyA - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
"Deathstar hard drive from IBM"I believe you're referring to the Deskstar's famous temperatures?