ADATA Premier Pro SP920 256GB Solid State Drive Review

A Closer Look

With the new type of drive coming to ADATA’s product portfolio, we see a slight change in the design of the drive itself. A matt aluminium coloured case lightens up the drives appearance and on the top surface of the drive, a thin metal lid with a screw in each corner features a simple product label with the ADATA hummingbird at the top (as seen in the teaser image from last week) with the model and capacity printed below.

The plastic 2mm plate sits cleanly on the top of the drive allowing the SP920 to fit better in larger 2.5″ drive bays, leaving the label still on show in the middle.

On the rear of the drive, there’s no surprises that we get he usual array of serial and model numbers, the key part that we have to note here is the serial key for the included copy of Acronis True Image Home. Placing the serial number where means you’ll never misplace the code – that’s unless you forget where you leave the drive!

Opening up the drive (This will VOID your warranty!) we can see where the controller lies in relation to the drive casing – a thick thermal pad bridging the gap between the board and metal casing.

As far as component layout goes, the controller and memory sit close to the SATA header with eight NAND packages positioned towards the other end of the board.

Making up the 256GB of storage on our review drive, ADATA have sought NAND from Micron and looking at the FBGA code that is printed on the face of the package we can ascertain that this is the same type of package as found on Crucial’s M550 that I looked at a couple of weeks back. Each of the (NW386) MT29F256G08CECABH6 packages here pack 64Gb per die, giving 256GB overall. Like the M550, the SP920 also offers up the full raw capacity to the end-user with no over provisioning needed.

As mentioned above, the SP920 utilises a Marvell controller, specifically one of the latest 88SS9189-BLD2 single core 8 lane variants. Paired with this we have a 256MB DDR3 buffer again from Micron. (512GB models have 512MB DDR3 and 1TB models will sport 1GB DDR3)

Over on the other side of the PCB there is not a lot going on, although the larger capacity 512GB and 1TB SSDs are likely to have this side of the board populated with more NAND packages.