ADATA Premier SP610 review

The ADATA Premier SP610 differs from other solid-state drives on the market in that it uses a Silicon Motion controller, instead of the more common Marvell models. This manufacturer has been around for a while, and other companies such as Corsair use its controllers. The ADATA Premier SP610’s SM2246EN controller supports the SATA III (6Gbit/s) interface, and has a a claimed read speed of 560MB/s and write speeds of 290MB/s for the 256GB capacity SSD we tested.

The Premier SP610 is also available in larger 512GB and 1TB capacities, both of which have a higher rated write speed of 450MB/s. The cost per GB is around average across the capacities, at between 37p and 40p per GB.

For its DRAM chips, in common with many other mid-priced SSDs, the Premier SP610 uses 20nm MLC (multi-level-cell) NAND with an Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) rating of 73,000.

There isn’t much in the way of included accessories, such as a mounting kit, but you do get a spacer to help fit the 7.5mm-thick drive in a laptop with a 9.5mm drive bay. There is also a free download of Acronis True Image HD included, which will be useful for anyone looking to migrate their data, such as Windows installation, from an old disk.

The Premier SP610 did reasonably well in our benchmarks. The SSD managed 487.3MB/s in our large-file read test, and 451.7MB/s in our large-file write test. This leads to an overall score of 469.5MB/s, making the SP610 an average performer when it comes to large-file performance for its price. We sometimes saw faster large-file read speeds above 600MB/s, but this was only occasionally.

Small-file performance wasn’t quite as impressive, but was still respectable. We recorded small file read speeds of 85.7MB/s and write speeds of 99.4MB/s for an overall small-file speed of 92.6MB/s. It’s not the fastest SSD, but it’s fairly good value per gigabyte.

The ADATA Premier SP610 is a good proposition for those that don’t need the absolute best performance. However, it trails behind the Patriot Blaze and Crucial MX100 for overall performance. By far our favourite low-cost SSD is the SanDisk Ultra II, though, which is only fractionally more expensive than Adata’s model and provides far superior large-file performance. If you’re looking for the best SSDs then also check out our Best SSD 2015 buying guide.