Since the original hard drive was developed by the US Navy back in the 1950’s, much has changed including higher capacities, smaller form factors, and recently the disappearance of moving parts. The development of Solid State Drives (SSD) is one of the more recent ones and SSDs have only lately become affordable for the average consumer. Though pricey they provide superior performance and in some aspects, better reliability.

First off we would like to thank Cooler Master for providing us with the A-DATA 32Gb XPG SSD review sample. To test the performance of the A-DATA 32GB XPG SSD, we will, firstly, clone an image of an existing hard drive on to the SSD using the Choiix Air-Through Stash, and, secondly, we will fully benchmark the SSD in real life usage and using synthetic benchmarks.

Specifications

A-DATA 32GB XPG SSD Review (ASX1032GSUMAL)

Dimensions 3.94“ x 2.76“ x 0.36“ (100.0 x 70.1 x 9.2 mm)
Weight: 85+/-1g
Material: Aluminum
Interface:
>Mini USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s max)
>SATA I/II (Read up to 170MB/s, Write up to 100 MB/s)
Operating Temp.: -10°C~70°C
Shock Resistance: 1500G/0.5ms
MTBF: 1,500,000 hrs.
Color: Silver

Form Factor: 2.5”
Spindle Speed: MLC
Warranty: 2 Years

Price: N/A

Safely sheathed in a small and shiny box is the metal encased SSD. The package includes the SSD, a USB A to B cable and the necessary documents. The SSD its self is comprised of a light weight aluminum casing protecting the MLC NAND flash memory and controller inside.

Although MLC chips do not perform as well or last as long as SLC chips, the majority of consumer SSDs use MLC chips much like the A-DATA XPG SSD. This is due to the price: SLC SSDs tend to be exceptionally expensive putting them out of range for most average consumers.

There are two connectors on the SSD, one is the standard SATA connector and the other is a USB port. Both cannot be plugged in together at the same time though both allow for data transfer between the SSD and another storage solution.

Performance

To test the SSD we decided to clone an existing hard drive and then benchmark it. To clone the hard drive we used the Choiix Air-Through Stash and Acronis True Image Trial. We installed the SSD into the Air-Through Stash and connected it to our Asus N10 netbook.

Cloning the hard drive was simple, and with a few clicks we were able to get the process going. To calculate the speed of the transfer we used basic mathematics. We put the size of the cloned image on top of the number of seconds it took to transfer and created a fraction which equaled 32MB/s. (While transferring the files the fan of the Air-Through Stash was running.)

From there we removed the SSD from the cooler and installed it into the netbook. Moreover, we moved the original drive into the Choiix Air-Through Stash to expand our overall storage space.

It is important to note that the Asus N10 has a limited SATA Bus

Real Life Performance

The startup time of the netbook shaved several seconds and general performance significantly improved. For example, browsing through files or even the web on the Asus N10 is bottlenecked by the overall hardware of the netbook. The SSD picked up enough of the workload to smooth out the performance.

Battery and Temperature

In regards to battery life it was only increased by 10 minutes. It is a common misconception that installing any SSD will improve battery time significantly.

From a temperature perspective the XPG SSD helped cool down the system. It does not have a temperature sensor, but by looking at the other hardware such as the CPU, we noticed a temperature drop of an average 4C while idle and 7C while under load. This is due to the heat produced by the SSD being less than by the previous hard disk.

Synthetic Benchmarks

We used four separate benchmark programs to test the performance of the SSD.  We began with Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 which has become the most popular standard for benchmarking solid state drive.  Following it we ran ATTO Bench, HdTach and HD Tune.

ATTO Bench	HdTach	HD Tune

Conclusion

Overall the A-DATA 32Gb SSD proved to be a decent budget oriented SSD. It provides acceptable performance and runs cool. It installed easily and the Choiix Air-Through stash makes a perfect partner for a lower capacity SSDs ~40GB. After removing the original hard drive, it can be installed into the Air-Through and connect it to the netbook to provide storage for your files.