Overall and Final Verdict
So the SU800 is an exciting SSD simply because of the introduction of 3D NAND. By stacking, the capacities of NAND are going up, allowing for fewer chips being used and it will eventually mean higher drive capacities being available and lower costs. You can already see it with the SU800, the pricing for the drive is on the lower end of 256GB drives and the performance is up closer to the high end of SATA drives. As I’m writing this they even have an additional rebate, making the SU800 an even better deal, but I don’t know if that will be available by the time I publish this (I’m about a week out).
The performance of the SU800 isn’t perfect, about half of our tests put it in the middle of the pack. But there are a few promising benchmarks like the AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark tests that do show that the SU800 is capable of high throughput, especially on the reads but it just falls off on a few others like the read IOPS results in Anvils benchmark. I also wasn’t a big fan of the half plastic casing. It keeps costs down and weights low but the plastic is also going to hold temperatures in more. In the end, ADATA managed to make a good performing budget drive, in my opinion, I wouldn’t put it up into the higher end even if they include Ultimate in the name. But I would consider it as a great buy for a mid-range build. That’s about where SATA based drives fall anyhow, though, anyone looking to go crazy is looking past SATA to M.2 NVME drives anyhow.
Live Pricing: HERE
