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ADATA Premier SP550 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the ADATA Premier SP550 can be had for just $62.99 at NewEgg, £65.30 at Amazon UK, or starting from €75.81 through Geizhals.

Conclusion

Triple-level-cell NAND has made the move from mechanical hard disk drives possible for a lot more people thanks to the lower purchase costs, and ADATA’s Premier SP550 is a prime example for this. You get a drive that performs a lot better than a mechanical drive in most situations at a fraction of the price that SSDs used to cost.

TLC NAND is also a more power efficient type of memory and ADATA also added a controller that supports the new DevSleep, or device sleep, power save mode to make it even better for mobile and battery driven systems. And those systems are those you don’t want mechanical storage inside, it is simply too risky in regards to shock and drive damage. A cheap SSD option here is more than welcome. TLC does have a few downsides such as slightly lower sequential writes and drops to HDD speeds on very long writes. But let us face it, how much do we actually write? most of our data throughput is generated from reads and the TLC NAND is great at that.

ADATA also added every other feature to the Premier SP550 that you would want from a drive like this, such as S.M.A.R.T., TRIM, NCQ, Garbage Collection, and wear leveling. The advanced LDPC ECC technology that the Premier SP550 offers adds reliability with strong data protection and better durability than comparable products with normal ECC. The drive also supports RAID Engine and Data Shaping in order to provide a better lifespan and longer stability.

The included 9.5mm drive adapter and key for Acronis True Image HD adds further value to a drive that already comes with a high total-bytes-written rating as well as a 3-year warranty. Overall, a worthy replacement for those old 2.5-inch laptop hard disk drives.

Pros