Overall and Final Verdict
So some of the ultra-fast NVME drives might get all of the attention, but the PC market wouldn’t survive if the only options we have are only the greatest and latest. The reality is when building or upgrading PCs we have to keep things in our budget and part of that is going with mid-range or budget focused parts. For a lot of people, that has meant just going with a SATA based SSD or even a basic hard drive. Even though I am extremely late to covering the XPG SX6000 from ADATA, this is a great example of a drive to check out rather than going with a SATA based SSD. This includes M.2 drives that are SATA based as well. It might look a little slow when compared to the other PCIe based M.2 drives in our tests, but you have to keep in mind it is also twice as fast as even the best SATA based drives.
Even with that in mind, I was surprised to see how well it did perform in one of our specific tests. The AS SSD timed file transfer test which uses real-world file types like gamines, programs, and ISOs had the SX6000 only slower than the WD Black drives. The other thing I really liked about the SX6000 is that they included a simple headspreader than you can add to clean up the looks of the drive. M.2 drives aren’t always known for looking amazing and with most builds including a window and lighting, it is nice to know you don’t have to go with a high-end drive to get one that is going to look good.
Now not all of the performance was amazing, the SX6000 does still perform about 1/3 of the speed of the high-end M.2 NVMe drives so if you are looking for raw performance you are going to need to look at a few of the other drives available. This is mostly because the drive itself is dated and end of life. In fact, ADATA has brought out two other SX6000 drives a lite model and a pro model. The Pro model is actually on sale right now on ADATAs own web store. Both move up to PCIe x4 and with that are significantly faster than the original SX6000 that I tested here.
Now the original SX6000 is still available on Newegg in the 128GB capacity for an impressive $29.99 so if you are looking for a nice jump in performance over a SATA drive or even better from a hard drive that model is a steal. If not the SX6000 Pro at $79.99 on the Adata website or the same price for the Lite version from Newegg are both still as cheap as you can get an NVMe drive.
Live Pricing: HERE
