The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 1TB SSD Review: Realtek's Entry-level NVMe Solution
by Billy Tallis on December 18, 2019 12:30 PM ESTConclusion
The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro offers decent performance for an entry-level NVMe SSD. Its performance profile is a bit atypical: peak performance is definitely lower than most of its competitors (especially drives using Silicon Motion controllers), but in most cases the SX6000 Pro handles our harder tests better than expected. This is surprising because the SX6000 Pro takes the approach of using the largest SLC cache sizes possible, which is usually a way to optimize for peak performance.
The SX6000 Pro is still clearly an entry-level NVMe SSD and not a high-end drive, so it does have its performance pitfalls. But they're not as bad or as easy to run into as most other drives in this product segment. The SX6000 Pro slows down a ton if you keep writing to it after the SLC cache fills up, but given enough idle time it will clean things up and go on to provide better performance with a full drive than any of its competitors. It's ill-suited to workloads like video editing, but for more typical desktop usage it reliably outperforms SATA SSDs by a wide margin.
So Realtek's second-generation NVMe controller has overcome the performance limitations of their first attempt, and is now ready to grab some market share as the mainstream consumer storage market moves on from SATA.
Realtek is however definitely still new to the storage game, and their controller platform still has some rough edges. The power management situation for their RTS5763DL controller is seriously disappointing. We usually see DRAMless SSDs turning in some of the lowest power consumption numbers thanks to the reduced part count, and where they have reasonable performance that translates to excellent efficiency scores. The SX6000 Pro never gets close to having great efficiency; at best it manages to be about average. Under load, it often ends up delivering less than half the performance per Watt of other DRAMless NVMe SSDs that have similar overall performance.
The SX6000 Pro also fails to provide idle power management suitable for mobile use. It does have some ability to reduce power at idle so it isn't in danger of overheating from typical interactive workloads, but for a laptop its competitors are 30x better in their deepest idle state. On the bright side, the power management situation for this Realtek controller is less broken than a lot of the early NVMe controllers we saw from other vendors, so they have less to fix with their next generation.
Overall, if it weren't for the power consumption, the SX6000 Pro would be a fairly strong competitor within this low-end NVMe segment. But this is also the least-compelling product segment of the overall SSD market: these drives are still usually more expensive than mainstream SATA SSDs, and jumping up to a true high-end NVMe drive doesn't add much to the price tag.
| 240-256GB | 480-512GB | 1TB | |
| ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro | $39.99 (16¢/GB) |
$77.88 (15¢/GB) |
$119.99 (12¢/GB) |
| ADATA XPG GAMMIX S5 | $39.99 (16¢/GB) |
$109.99 (11¢/GB) |
|
| Mushkin Helix-L | $36.99 (15¢/GB) |
$56.99 (11¢/GB) |
$104.99 (10¢/GB) |
| HP EX900 | $36.99 (15¢/GB) |
$56.99 (11¢/GB) |
$120.17 (12¢/GB) |
| Kingston A2000 | $39.99 (16¢/GB) |
$59.99 (12¢/GB) |
$159.00 (16¢/GB) |
| Crucial P1 | $67.57 (14¢/GB) |
$99.99 (10¢/GB) |
|
| Intel 660p | $64.99 (13¢/GB) |
$108.99 (11¢/GB) |
|
| Intel 665p | $124.99 (12¢/GB) |
||
| WD Blue SN500 | $43.99 (18¢/GB) |
$54.99 (11¢/GB) |
|
| WD Blue SN550 | $69.99 (28¢/GB) |
$89.99 (18¢/GB) |
|
| ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro | $49.99 (20¢/GB) |
$69.99 (14¢/GB) |
$147.99 (14¢/GB) |
| HP EX950 | $71.99 (14¢/GB) |
$126.99 (12¢/GB) |
|
| Mushkin Pilot-E | $67.99 (14¢/GB) |
$129.99 (13¢/GB) |
|
| Samsung 970 EVO Plus | $69.99 (28¢/GB) |
$99.99 (20¢/GB) |
$197.48 (20¢/GB) |
| Silicon Power P34A80 | $41.99 (16¢/GB) |
$62.99 (12¢/GB) |
$114.99 (11¢/GB) |
| WD Black SN750 | $62.99 (25¢/GB) |
$79.99 (16¢/GB) |
$196.00 (20¢/GB) |
The low-end NVMe market is currently plagued by inconsistent availability and pricing, so it's hard to get a clear picture of how the products rate against each other in terms of overall value. Most of these drives are relatively low-volume products compared to the high-end models from the same brands, and the Intel and WD drives are currently transitioning between generations. But in spite of all of that, the ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro and the related GAMMIX S5 (with a heatsink) collectively offer pricing in the right ballpark for this segment, but it's undercut at every capacity by drives like the Mushkin Helix-L. The SX6000 Pro is also facing pressure from above in the form of cheap Phison E12 drives, with the Silicon Power P34A80 currently offering some of the lowest prices. That provides far better performance and power efficiency for little or no added cost.
The ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro shows that Realtek is making a lot of progress with their SSD controllers, but they aren't quite ready to steal a lot of market share from Silicon Motion and Phison as of yet. They've almost caught up, but they will need to offer SSD controller platforms with compelling advantages in order to entice drive vendors away from their existing partnerships.
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Samus - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
I don’t think you are being critical enough of this drive. It is appallingly bad. It’s basically outclassed by SATA drives from years ago in almost every metric except sequential performance (where NVMe will naturally excel)But real world performance is terrible, power usage is high (and it has broken devsleep) and it isn’t very cheap. When you consider reliability is a total u known I’m struggling to imagine a single person who would consider this.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Let me make it a bit clearer for you: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2533?vs=22...The MX500 beats the SX6000 Pro on just ONE of those performance metrics. The picture's not that different if you compare against a Samsung SATA drive. Overall performance is clearly much better than a SATA SSD. It's not appallingly bad. It just isn't a high-end NVMe drive.
DPUser - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Appallingly Clearer. : )Alistair - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
haha nice :)JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Based Billy Tallis *dabbing* on the n00bs in the comments section. FACTS don't care about your feelings, Samus. It's times like this I'm glad you can't edit your comments, since moments like these are eternalized forever.MFinn3333 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
To be fair, the Samsung 850 Pro does beat it in the sustained random read/writes, power efficiency of said read/writes and uses a lot less power while active idle.https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2310?vs=25...
(Blue is Samsung and Orange is ADATA because Samsung is blue in my mind).
To be fairer, the Samsung is at least five years old, costs three times as much if you can get it, and has an idle response that is 15X worse than the ADATA. The ADATA is clearly the better drive for 99% of the population.
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
It's absolutely appallingly bad. You can't simply excuse broken power management with "the other vendors messed it up too", the point is that none of those other vendors have messed it up NOW. Realtek failed to learn from and avoid their competitors' mistake, and by doing so have introduced their controller with a handicap versus the same competitors. It's also both unproven, slower, and more expensive than older controllers that do have a known track record, so that's four strikes against the RTS5763DL.In contrast, drives using the two-year-old SM2263XT are faster, cheaper, and to be blunt, just better. There is thus no reason why anybody would ever choose a drive using RTS5763DL, and its complete failure to compete is only going to become more apparent once the next-gen SMI and Phison controllers arrive (and E12 products go EOL and get huge discounts).
In short, while not as bad as Realtek's attempt at a SATA SSD controller, the RTS5763DL is just a plain bad product that simply cannot be recommended in any way shape or form.
milli - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Well look at this one again then: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15139/sus...I've learned from real-life usage that this test is one of the most important metrics that you will notice in your day to day usage. The Realtek is by far the fastest cacheless NVMe controller out there in this test.
Also while the drive lacks DEVSLP, statements like "broken power management" are just false. The graphs clearly show that it cuts power in half in each state. Lacking DEVSLP does not equal broken power management. ADATA even clearly states this on their website.
gregassagraf - Wednesday, July 21, 2021 - link
well... I installed the xpg Gammix s41 which is based in the same microcontroller! I lost more than an hour of battery life in my laptop and now sleep mode is basically useless. One big mistake in my part was caring only about read and write speeds. I can't wait to replace this drive, its driving me mad!mark625 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
The HP EX950 1TB has been my favorite value/$ drive for a while, and it costs a whole $7 more than the SX6000 Pro. It whomps the XPG drive in almost every test, and in many tests it is more than twice as fast.In what possible scenario would the XPG drive be a smarter purchase than the HP? None that I can see. This review is way too forgiving.