ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB SSD Review
General Overview
ADATA as with their other M.2 drives, has included a heatsink which is really for the controller more than the NAND. The heatsink is but a thin piece of metal that remains too hot to the touch to be an effective method of cooling. This is right of the bat the weakest part of this drive but also the only weakness of the SX8200 Pro. With so many motherboards featuring their own M.2 cooling this should not be a deal breaker.
While I did not graph operating temperatures, do note that under sustained write operations, you can see temperatures (software) as high as 71’C. That said, normal operating temperatures are well below that at 35 to 59’C depending on how much air flow the drive receives. As with all M.2 drives cooling is of paramount importance and you’d do well to make sure that the drive never reaches those stratospheric temperatures. Not only does it compromise performance, but more importantly your data integrity.
The SX8200 Pro uses rebranded Micron 3D TLC, Nanya DRAM for cache and of course the SMI SM2262EN controller. Since this drive uses SLC caching, it is inevitable that once the cache has been filled the drive performance will drop as data is written directly to the NAND. This shouldn’t be an issue for most uses, but under sustained writes, it could be something that shows up quite significantly.
