ADATA has engineered a well-rounded NVMe PCIe SSD with the SX8000 that doesn't break the bank and offers good performance. Important circuitry on the M.2 2280 board is an SMI controller and four 3D MLC flash chips, which, when heavily loaded, don't suffer from the write hole TLC exhibits. Also, some people might trust MLC more than TLC, which in my opinion is a thing of the past, at least for reputable vendors.

In our real-life testing, we see excellent performance that, when averaged, even exceeds the much more expensive Samsung 950 Pro, which doesn't do so well in the ISO file copy and MS Office installation test, but shines in random IO workloads where the SX8000 falls behind a bit due to higher IO latency (refer to the synthetic latency testing). One thing has to be clear though: NVMe doesn't magically make your disk IO infinitely fast. Modern 2.5" SATA drives are already very fast, shifting the performance bottleneck away from storage and towards CPU and software algorithms. NVMe can just shift that a little bit more without showing the huge gains we all experienced when switching from HDD to SSD.

Our thermal testing reveals that the drive can easily cope with heavy writes without cooling, but at some point, it will still start throttling to keep drive temperatures sane. What I found a bit surprising is that the drive reports its own temperature as 66°C to software, while the actual temperature is 90°C. This shouldn't be an issue, though, since the thermal protection mechanism is working perfectly fine.

Price-wise, the ADATA SX8000 clocks in at an extremely reasonable $220 for the tested 512 GB version, which makes it one of the most affordable PCIe SSDs on the market. Most of the cheaper models are using the much slower M.2 SATA interface, recognizable by the two notches on the connector. If you can find the SX8000 without a heatsink at a significantly better price, $20 less maybe, then go for it; the heatsink doesn't make a huge difference, certainly not for normal consumer workloads.