If you’re in the market for a 960 GB SSD but you’ve been waiting for a deal, here’s one that’s been worth waiting for: an A-Data SP550 for $188. It’s remarkable only for the price, but what a price.
A-Data is a second-tier manufacturer, which puts them in the same league as companies like PNY and below companies that make their own memory, like Micron/Crucial, Intel, Sandisk, and Toshiba. This particular drive uses a Silicon Motion controller and Hynix flash memory. The interesting thing about using Hynix memory is that Hynix, unlike other flash makers, doesn’t sell its own drives, so A-Data doesn’t have to compete with its supplier for the best chips.
Performance-wise, it’s a slower drive, delivering around 48 MB/second doing random IO (which is the majority of what you’ll be doing), which is more than 10 times what you can expect from a so-called performance hard drive. A performance SSD will deliver 80-85 MB/second, so while you may notice the difference between a performance SSD and a budget SSD, the budget SSD still blows the doors off a traditional hard drive.
This is a faster drive than a Crucial BX200, and it’s priced a good $60 lower than a Crucial BX200 of the same capacity. All things being equal, I’d opt for the Crucial drive, but when the price difference is 24 percent, the A-Data is tempting indeed.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.