With the growing prevalence of crypto currencies and the mining of them, having the right hardware has never been more important. In recent months, the Chia crypto currency has seen a surge in popularity. Unlike other crypto currencies, Chia is based on a proof of space time model rather than proof of work model used by other currencies. In terms of hardware, this mean Chia places more importance on storage rather than performance.

Given its leading position and expertise in high-capacity storage products, ADATA SSDs have been the go-to hardware for many Chia miners the world over. In April of 2021, ADATA saw a five-fold month-over-month increase in its SSD and DRAM orders. What's more, in multiple articles written about the recent Chia trend, many media outlets have cited ADATA SSDs as ideal solutions for Chia mining. The popularity of Chia and its resulting demand for high-capacity SSDs looks to continue.

ADATA has recently been in a spot of controversy when it comes to their XPG SX8200 Pro solid-state drive (SSD). The company has reportedly shipped many different configurations of the SSD with different drive controller clock speeds and different NAND flash. According to the original report, ADATA has first shipped the SX8200 Pro SSD with Silicon Motion SM2262ENG SSD controller, running at 650 MHz with IMFT 64-layer TLC NAND Flash. However, it was later reported that the SSD was updated to use the Silicon Motion SM2262G SSD controller, clocked at 575 MHz. With this report, many users have gotten concerned and started to question the company's practices. However, ADATA later ensured everyone that performance is within the specifications and there is no need to worry.

Today, we have another report about the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro SSD. According to a Redditor, ADATA has once again updated its SSD with a different kind of NAND Flash, however, this time the report indicated that performance was impacted. Tom's Hardware has made a table of changes showing as many as five revisions of the SSD, all with different configurations of SSD controllers and NAND Flash memory. We have contacted ADATA to clarify the issues that have emerged, and this is the official response that the company gave us.

Amidst falling prices of NAND flash and increased desirability from users' part, companies have been expanding their portfolio of SSD offerings for the consumer side of the fence as well as the enterprise one. ADATA's XPG SX8200 Pro SSD was initially only offered in 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB configurations, but in the case of SSD storage, "moar" is usually better. We'll see when do 256 GB offerings get discontinued, but I'd give it another pair of years at the most.

The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro features Silicon Motion's SM2262EN controller packing eight NAND channels, four ARM Cortex-R5 cores, support for NVMe 1.3, LDPC ECC, RAID engine et all (eh), paired with Micron's 3D TLC NAND - no QLC here, folks. The SSD offers up to 3.5 GB/s sequential read speed and up to 3 GB/s sequential write speed, and up to 360K random read/write 4K IOPS. The ADATA SSD features a TBW rating of 1280 TB over a 5-year warranty period - and a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) rate of 2,000,000 hours (something like 83.333, 33 (3) days of continuous usage. Now that's north of two hundred years of continuous operation, which makes me sad just thinking about it and what I'd do with that time. In another conscience state, perhaps. ADATA's 2 TB XPG SX8200 Pro is $289.99, in select European countries (from eBay) at about €308, and in Japan for ¥36,680.