The world of storage is evolving very quickly as the way PCs are built change. We have watched as the traditional single dive systems have given way to hybrid drives, multiple disk systems and even systems with additional cache in them. All of these measures are designed to give you more options for your system, but there is (at times) a limit to what can be done. This is typically the size of the drive. For years the typical disk was 3.5 inches and about ½ of what the common bay height was. With the original SSDs this dropped significantly and has been followed on by mSATA, mini-mSATA and now M.2. These offer high density storage in a very small package. Today we are checking out ADATA’s SP900NS38 256GB M.2 SATA SSD. Let’s see what kind of performance it offers shall we?
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. After some searching we were finally able to locate some reliable pricing information for the ADATA SP900NS83. For the 256GB flavor you can expect to pay around $135. This price drops down to $80 for the $128GB version and jumps to about $400 for the 512GB one. These prices are not the best on the market, but they are not too far out of line with the capacity and performance you get with them.
Conclusion -Now that SSDs are no longer new storage devices are not what you would exactly call “sexy” just about everyone that is building a system is moving to some sort of solid state storage. With the introduction of much smaller and tailored SSDs including SATA Express and M.2 things are getting back to being sexier. The ADATA SP900NS83 is one of those devices that is helping. After seeing what this drive can do on a Mini-ITX board like the Asus Z97-I Plus would seriously consider a build with one of these as the boot drive and dump everything else into slower storage. The performance you get is excellent for launching applications and streaming data to you and the capacity/price is solid. If you are thinking of building an SFF system and are looking for some small fast energy efficient storage, the ADATA SP900NS83 256GB M.2 drive would be a very solid choice.
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