Adata XPG SX950U

VERDICT Nippy and affordable, the SX950U is a sensible SATA SSD even if it isnt the absolute best.

- James Archer

A DATA IS PRESENTING this 2.5in SSD as a PC gaming aid, albeit in very general terms – which is unsurprising, considering that the type of storage drive you use has no bearing on things such as frame rates or latency in online games.

It won’t give you an advantage, in other words, but then there are game-specific quality of life improvements that come with switching from a hard disk to an SSD. Load times are shorter, for instance, so you can spend more time playing and less time staring at progress bars, and a faster drive can also reduce the ‘hitching’ effect sometimes seen in open world games: this occurs when the game can’t pull assets from the drive fast enough, causing stuttering even when the GPU is keeping frame rates high. These issues aren’t solved with vaguely defined ‘designed for gaming’ hoodoo, however: all you need to rely on are good old-fashioned read and write speeds.

The XPG SX950U at least aims high on these terms. Its stated maximum read speed is 560MB/s, which is about the best you can expect from a SATA-based SSD, and its highest given write speed of 520MB/s is very ambitious, too. That’s only for the 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacity versions, however; the entry-level 120GB model has the same maximum read speed but a lower maximum write speed of just 420MB/s. We tested the 240GB model, so it should be indicative of the larger capacities too.

ECONOMY RUN