ADATA Premier Pro SP920 128GB SSD Review

Introduction

As we alluded to in the ADATA Premier Pro SP920 1TB review, we have all four-capacity sizes in house to test. Rather than place all four drives in a single review and compare them to just one capacity size, we're breaking the reviews into individual reviews in order to compare apples to apples, or in this case, similar capacity sizes.

When shopping for an SSD, most of us start with the price. Once we know how much we can spend on an SSD, we can look at the capacity, performance, accessory package, and warranty to determine what to buy. All of these factors are variables between different makes, models, and even capacity sizes. Starting with the price means you may be able to get a larger, but often slower, SSD for the same money. We like to look for the best balance.

Specifications, Pricing and Availability

The ADATA Premier Pro SP920 pairs the Marvell 88SS9189 controller with Micron 20nm 128Gb die size flash in all four capacity sizes. This works out well for the two largest capacity sizes, 1TB and 512GB, but the smaller two models, 128GB and 256GB, are slower due to the loss in parallelism when reading and writing to the flash.

SSDs work like RAID arrays; the controller reads and writes data to more than one NAND flash die at the same time. The more reads and writes that can happen at the same time, the higher the performance. Using 128Gb dies poses a problem on smaller SSDs because the drive doesn't achieve the optimal parallelism.

ADATA sent pricing over via MSRPs for the Premier Pro SP920 series. The 128GB should launch at $89.99, 256GB at $159.99, 512GB at $334.88, and the massive 1TB model at $529.99.

The SP920 128GB at $89.99 represents one of the best values on the market today based on price and the accessory package. ADATA includes a desktop adapter bracket, screws for mounting, Acronis data migration software, a 7mm to 9.5mm adapter, and ADATA even has a new SSD Toolbox that takes care of drive maintenance without third party software.