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 started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.