SSD Review – ADATA SP610 512GB Versus Corsair Force LX 512GB
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
When it comes to value product lines you need to have reasonable expectations and we must say these two budget-conscious drives were fairly impressive. The Silicon Motion controller with Micron 20nm MLC Flash has shown itself to be a good combination when it comes to both price and overall performance. If you haven’t made the move to an SSD and are still using a traditional hard drive as your primary drive hopefully these new high capacity budget drives are causing you to rethink using a hard drive as your primary storage device.
The performance of the ADATA Premier SP610 512GB and Corsair Force LX 512GB drives were very similar since all the same core components and even the firmware are virtually identical. Overall performance was spot on as we were able to hit 559 MB/s read and 455MB/s write when it came to sequential speeds, which is close to their rated 560MB/460MB speeds. The degraded and recovered performance was looked at with the PCMark 8 consistency test and we found that these drives do well for the most part. We found that in a degraded state the performance does drop off a bit and can be erratic at times, but in a recovered state the are pretty competitive with other drives on the market.
Silicon Motion is a rather new company, so it will be interesting to see how the SM2246EN controller does over time. For the time being it looks a pretty good SSD Controller, but time will tell how good it really is. The one thing we noticed is that DevSleep doesn’t appear to be functioning on either drive and it is a feature that is said to be supported by Silicon Motion. This only really matters if you plan on putting it into an Intel Haswell platform and even then it really only applies to laptop users that are looking to get the longest battery life possible. Hopefully we will see Silicon Motion comment on the DevSleep issue shortly or issue a new firmware that rectifies whatever the situation is. We also heard that TCG Opal 2.0 support is coming in a future firmware release, so we will see how well Silicon Motion can roll out fixes and new features in the months ahead.
The best part about these two drives is the price. The ADATA Premier SP610 512GB SSD is found under part number ASP610SS3-512GM-C for $239.99 shipped and the Corsair Force LX Series 512GB SSD (part number CSSD-F512GBLX) is $249.99 shipped. That means these drives are about $0.47 per GB, which is pretty good considering that is without rebate or any big promotional discount. We can see these drives falling close down to $199-$219 when there are specials and rebates going on and for that price it looks like they’ll be hard to ignore. These drives are big enough to use as a primary drive for most enthusiasts and should be more than enough for the average consumer that doesn’t have a zillion games installed or a huge music or video library.
Which drive are you better off getting? Both are basically the same internally and both have 3-year warranties, so you are down to differences in the accessory bundles, software, brand loyalty and the ever so important price tag. We’ll let you figure that one out as it comes down to personal choice.
Legit Bottom Line: The Corsair Force LX 512GB and ADATA Premier SP610 512GB SSDs are considered to be budget SSDs and the price is significantly lower than high-end drives, but they still offer solid performance numbers!