ADATA Readies XPG GAMMIX S50 PCI-E 4.0 M.2 SSDs
ADATA enters the PCI-E 4.0 SSD fray with Phison controller leading the charge
ADATA recently announced two new M.2 2280 form factor NVMe solid state drives under its XPG brand. The new XPG GAMMIX S50 SSDs come in 1TB and 2TB capacities and sport support for the new PCI-E 4.0 interface and its increased bandwidth over the same number (x4) of lanes.
Clad in a surprisingly not outlandish aluminum heatsink (no RGB here, folks), the XPG Gammix S50 pairs the Phison PS5016-E16-32 controller with 512GB of DRAM cache from SK Hynix and 3D NAND flash from Micron. The new drives support SLC caching as well as data protection and encryption technologies all of which is to be expected from modern SSDs. When it comes to performance, ADATA claims that the XPG Gammix S50 is capable of up to 5,000 MB/s sequential reads, 4,400 MB/s sequential writes, and 750,000 random read/write IOPS. OF course, enthusiasts will need all devices in the path to support PCI-E 4.0 to hit those speeds as they surpass what is possible over the four lanes when running in backwards compatible 3.0 or lower modes. The simple and thin heatsink is an interesting choice in today’s climate of large SSD heatsinks but is not a bad move as all that’s really required is keeping the controller cool enough that it does not throttle performance or fail while as a side benefit spreading a bit of that heat to the NAND flash chips. I am interested how they will hold up in reviews where they can really hit the drives with synthetic loads, but as a daily driver heat should not be an issue for the most part and the design aesthetic isn’t bad and would likely go well with a black/silver ASRock or Biostar racing board if you are into that (well, once they get it in X570 of course – or the whole will-they-won’t-they support PCI-E 4 on X470 gets figured out finally heh).
On the longevity front, the XPG GAMMIX S50 1TB and 2TB drives are rated at 1800 TBW and 3600 TBW respectively over the duration of the five year manufacturer warranty period along with a 1.75 million-hour MTBF. ADATA’s latest SSDs are set to be avaiable shortly with pricing varying by region (and not specified as expected heh). At the time of writing, the GAMMIX S50 PCI-E 4.0 NVMe 1.3 SSDs were not listed at online retailers. I would expect the drives to come in at a premium over the S11 and 8200 Pro, but otherwise being ADATA, competitive with other drives rocking PCI-E 4 support.
2020 should be an interesting year for storage as controllers other than Phison’s hit the market and competition heats up a bit along with the ever increasing capacities from more-dense and higher stacked NAND flash and decreasing price/GB.
