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) |
$379.99 (19¢/GB) |
The pricing for the Gammix S50 Lite is unimpressive but also unsurprising. The drive has a bit of bling and can advertise PCIe Gen4 support, so it ends up priced close to the Gen3 drives from top-tier brands like SK hynix and WD, though with less of a premium on the 2TB capacity. It is at least clearly cheaper than the high-end Gen4 drives with 8-channel controllers, even the older Phison E16 models. Still, there are dozens of brands selling Phison E12S or SM2262EN-based Gen3 drives that will have equivalent or better real-world performance to the S50 Lite, but are more affordable. The cheapest of those models come with shorter 3-year warranties, which may not be worth the savings to some consumers.
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yannigr2 - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Years are passing by and the cost per GB is moving up instead of down.deil - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
but speeds go up a lot. if you compare those to 60GB ssd's of 2005'ish those are 100x fasterStrangerGuy - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
Obviously he implies recent price trends in a market where some older products are clearly better then new ones not only in performance/$ but also in absolute performance.But sure please keep up your disingenuous trollish comparisons. Maybe you would also want to elaborate how current GPUs aren't overpriced because they are a million times faster than the 1998 TNT?
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Take a chill pill dude. You still get way more bang for your buck on sSDs now then you did 3-4 years ago. 4-8TB m.2 drives wern't even an option back then, and PCIe gen 4 is expensive to implement compared to gen 3.Also current GPUs are no more overpriced then the 8800ultra was, which adjusted for inflation was $1100, with NO mining excuses. Didnt even have 1GB of RAM FFS.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
well I think part of that is due to the chip shortage currently but i do agree, things like the intel 660p ssd are a great example of nand prices going down and for the btter a 1tb 90$ ssd, AMAZING as far as im concerned and most notebooks use ssds rather than hard drives, prices havent really gone up much for that super amazing benefit.Oxford Guy - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Part of that is the fact that QLC actively works against consumer value, by reducing the economy of scale cost-reduction benefit for TLC.People are literally giving themselves an arrow to the knee when they buy QLC.
Billy Tallis - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
You keep posting this comment on every article about storage, but that doesn't make it true. Your notion of "economy of scale" is pathetically naive and unconnected to the reality of how NAND flash memory is manufactured. Economies of scale in semiconductor manufacturing come primarily from having more and larger fabs. Using two different mask sets with those production lines instead of just one doesn't ruin those economies of scale. If it did, then you should have been complaining about companies manufacturing both 256Gbit and 512Gbit TLC dies at the same time.Oxford Guy - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Calling my argument 'pathetically naive' doesn't make your opinions true either.'Economies of scale in semiconductor manufacturing come primarily from having more and larger fabs. Using two different mask sets with those production lines instead of just one doesn't ruin those economies of scale.'
The reality is that every dollar consumers spend on QLC is a dollar less spent on TLC. That reduces the economy of scale for TLC by reducing TLC production.
Billy Tallis - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
"The reality is that every dollar consumers spend on QLC is a dollar less spent on TLC. That reduces the economy of scale for TLC by reducing TLC production."You have no basis for believing that adding some QLC to the mix of a NAND fab's output meaningfully affects the marginal cost of TLC production. I've never seen you hypothesize any mechanism for how that would actually work. You just keep asserting a general economic principal as if it's a fundamental law.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - link
You are trying to make this seem complex when it's extremely simple.As we have already seen with SLC and MLC, when a cheaper-to-produce technology comes along, production shifts to producing that technology -- reducing availability of the previous products. (That was a serious drawback for consumers before 3D manufacturing made TLC a much better solution than it was.) Scarcity + demand = higher prices. Reducing production increases scarcity. Eventually, it also generally reduces demand which, in turn, reduces production further.
We have already seen this with MLC. It's rather incredible to see anyone claim there is no evidence of exactly the process I've described. It's also extremely simple, and factual, that every dollar spent on QLC is a dollar not spent on TLC -- nor MLC.