ADATA announced the Falcon SSD just last month; it's the first M.2 NVMe SSD coming from ADATA directly. Previously, all their famous M.2 SSDs, like the SX8200 Pro and Gammix series, were positioned under the "XPG" brand, which is targeted at gamers. It seems ADATA has finally decided that M.2 NVMe storage is ready for the mainstream, and it's about time. The ADATA Falcon is based on the four-channel Realtek RTS5763DL paired with 3D TLC flash, probably from IMFT. Unlike some other low-cost SSDs, ADATA opted to keep the full PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, which ensures transfer rates can go above 2 GB/s. For cost reasons, a DRAM cache chip is not installed.

DRAM on an SSD is used as fast temporary storage for the drive's internal mapping tables, which translate between physical disk addresses (as seen by the OS) and the actual location of where the data is stored in the flash chips: "which chip, at which location." Using DRAM has a speed advantage as it operates much faster than flash, but it's a cost/performance trade off. A 1 TB SSD typically uses 1 GB of DRAM, which costs a few dollars. If you can save that, you'll be able to position your drive more aggressively, leading to more sales, or you'll enjoy higher margins. The disadvantage is that random write performance is lower because the controller has to access the flash more often to process the mapping tables. For nearly all consumer workloads, random write performance over a large area doesn't really matter as our benchmarks show. Consumer workloads are very read-heavy anyway, and if writes happen, they are localized over a relatively small area, which is exactly why DRAM-less SSDs were invented.

Averaged over all our benchmarks, we see the ADATA Falcon clearly in front of the QLC drives in our test group—an important win because QLC-based SSDs are highly competitive in terms of pricing. Against other TLC SSDs, the Falcon is roughly in the middle, matching the Team Group MP34 and Intel 760p. Against the fastest drives in our test group, like the HP EX950 and ADATA SX8200 Pro, the ADATA Falcon falls behind by 7%, which isn't that much. What I found a little bit surprising in the synthetics results is that random read performance is quite low, which usually isn't the case, not even on a DRAM-less drive. It seems that when performing QD1 Random Reads, the Realtek controller has to read from flash twice—once for the mapping table and a second time for the requested data.

Where the Realtek controller shines is heavy write performance. Unlike other SSDs on the market, ADATA has configured their drive to use as much capacity as possible in pseudo-SLC mode, which helps soak up large write bursts. On our 1 TB version, the maximum theoretically available SLC capacity is used—333 GB. This is a huge advantage over drives with small SLC cache. For example, the WD Black only has 6 GB, which means that write speeds will drop after just a few written GB; the ADATA Falcon will chug along happily for hundreds of GB. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, performance drops significantly, though, because the controller has literally no space left to work with, so it has to flush SLC to TLC in the background at the same time as handling incoming writes from the host system. Given the large size of the cache, it's unlikely you'll ever run into that problem, though. Once write activity stops, the drive will automatically flush SLC data to TLC, so maximum performance will be restored after a while.

The ADATA Falcon comes with a metal heatspreader, which looks great and definitely adds to the look and feel of the product. However, a heatspreader can not completely eliminate throttling under the toughest conditions. In our thermal test we saw throttling after around five minutes of non-stop writes, which is much later than on SSDs without a heatsink, which often begin throttling after just 60 seconds. When thermally throttled, write performance doesn't fall off a cliff and remains decent with 600–800 MB/s. Given the positioning of the Falcon, I would almost say "mission accomplished," as the heatsink avoids throttling just enough to ensure typical use cases run at maximum performance.

The real kicker for the ADATA Falcon is its price, no doubt. With just $130 for the reviewed 1 TB version, the drive is one of the most affordable M.2 NVMe TLC drives on the market. At that price there really isn't any reason to buy a SATA 2.5" SSD unless you are out of M.2 slots/PCIe connectivity. The Falcon does face competition from the QLC-based Crucial P1 and Sabrent Rocket Q, but personally, I'd lean toward the Falcon unless I know my workloads will be fine with QLC and benefit from the DRAM cache on those two SSDs. If you are willing to spend a few dollars more for higher performance, I'd recommend you take a look at the ADATA SX8200 Pro ($150) and the HP EX950 ($145), which both have a DRAM cache chip and generally offer higher overall performance. What's also important is that the ADATA Falcon is available in a 2 TB variant for just $240, very tempting!