ADATA XPG Gammix S50

The XPG Gammix S50 is ADATA’s first SSD that employs a PCIe Gen4 x4 interface. Consequently, it’s able to surpass the PCIe 3.0 performance barrier in recent systems (only 3rd-gen AMD Ryzen or Threadripper systems as of mid-2020).  Like every other competing PCI Express 4.0 m.2 SSD at the time of writing, the XPG Gammix S50 is based on the same Phison controller and TLC (triple-level cell) NAND combination.

Overview: Memory Type, Controller, and Cache

Through the first half of 2020, all available PCIe 4.0-enabled M.2 drives including the Gammix S50 use the same type of memory in combination with a Phison E16 controller. Other SSDs of the same type include the Seagate Firecuda 520, Sabrent Rocket Gen4 and Corsair’s MP600. Like its direct competitors, the S50 also comes with a DDR4 DRAM buffer and an SLC-mode cache to reach its advertised sequential performance.

Due to the same controller/NAND combo, the entire initial crop of PCI Express Gen4 drives performs about the same. Any difference will be due to variations in the drives’ firmware and design implementations. However, as the hardware is more or less identical, any differences will mostly be noticeable in synthetic benchmarks.

ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Vs. Seagate Firecuda 520

Although Seagate uses a custom firmware for the Firecuda 520, the differences between these models are as insignificant as you might expect from SSDs with the same controller and NAND. The maximum sequential read and write performance is nevertheless very high even when compared to high-end PCIe Gen3 SSDs, which max out at around 3,500 MB/s read speeds.

The usual performance drops in smaller capacities up to 1TB are not an issue with the ADATA Gammix S50 since it’s only available in 1TB and 2TB varieties. Both offer identical performance according to the spec sheet.

Several of the currently available Gen4 drives ship with a pre-attached heat spreader and the S50 is no exception. According to ADATA, the included heat sink is able to reduce temperatures by up to 10 C compared to those included with motherboards.

Warranty and Endurance Rating

The ADATA XPG Gammix S50 ships with an industry-standard 5-year warranty. The endurance ratings as measured in TBW (terabytes written) are similar or identical to the other Phison E16 drives at 1,800 TBW (1TB) and 3,600 TBW (2TB).

Expert Reviews

Hardwareinside.de (in German):

The measured performance values ​​come close to the advertised theoretical maximum values ​​of the controller. In addition to the high performance, there is also LDCP ECC on board, which ensures higher data error detection and correction.

Chip.de (in German)

The M.2 SSD Adata XPG Gammix S50 2TB is aimed at users who appreciate speed. In the test, the transfer rates are at a top level, as are the access times. Adata also has throttling under control and keeps the 2 TB SSD at a consistently high speed when writing continuously.