ADATA XPG SX930 (120GB, 240GB & 480GB) SSD Review: JMicron JMF670H Debuts

Final Words

To be frank, reviewing a SATA MLC SSD has gotten rather unexciting over the past year or so. On the performance side there are barely any areas where one can get enthusiastic about because the SATA 6Gbps interface and AHCI driver stack are both so saturated. It feels like the purpose of my testing is mostly to make sure that someone didn't totally screw up the product design because other than that the performance differences between modern SATA 6Gbps controllers are getting negligible. Only Samsung and SanDisk can provide performance that's distinguishably better than others, which leaves JMicron, Silicon Motion and Phison based drives fighting over the value segment.

This brings us to the SX930 and JMF670H. If I had to pick one word to describe the two, that would be 'average'. There is nothing that truly separates the SX930 and JMF670H from the drives and controllers that are already available. Performance wise the JMF670H is fairly similar to Silicon Motion's SM2246EN, but at the end of the day the SM2246EN wins in both performance and power efficiency, which makes it difficult for ADATA and JMicron to compete in areas other than price or features.

While utilizing higher binned MLC NAND (or "enterprise-grade" as ADATA calls it) could be considered as a differentiating feature, I don't consider NAND endurance to be a significant issue for client usage, so even though the NAND is likely higher quality than what you would find inside a BX100 for instance, it's not going to have any impact on the end-user. A five-year warranty is definitely a welcome addition, but that alone doesn't provide enough value to make the SX930 stand out, especially with Samsung offer a five-year warranty for the 850 EVO.

Since the SX930 is ADATA's high-end drive, the prices aren't exactly cheap. You are looking at about $20 premium over the BX100, which is hard to justify given that the BX100 actually provides better performance. While street pricing tends to be lower than MSRPs, it's clear that the SX930 needs to be about $20 cheaper to be competitive. At equal pricing with the BX100, I might lean towards the SX930 and take a marginal hit in performance for two years of additional warranty, but I wouldn't pay $20 for the warranty alone because of the rapid developments in SSD performance and prices dropping about 20% year over year. 

I did let JMicron know about my performance concerns when I tested the JMF670H reference design samples because sequential read performance in particular was below the average. JMicron promised an improvement through an upcoming firmware update and told me that the initial firmware mostly focused on optimizing performance for benchmarks such as CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD, which typically use higher IO sizes and queue depths to extract the maximum performance out of an SSD. With a firmware better optimized for low queue depths and real world workloads, I see potential in the SX930 and JMF670H, but nevertheless it still needs to be more competitive in price in order to tackle the BX100 and 850 EVO.