Introduction

ADATA is Taiwan's largest manufacturer of flash storage and DRAM memory for computers. They have been at the forefront of SSD development for many years, bringing us famous SSDs like the SX8200, SX900, and Gammix S70.

XPG is one of ADATA's sub-brands and creates products optimized for the needs of gamers.



Today, we are reviewing ADATA's new Atom 50 SSD, which is priced extremely competitively for a PCIe 4.0 SSD, just $120 for the reviewed 1 TB variant makes it the most affordable Gen 4 SSD by far. Under the hood, we found a brand-new Innogrit IG5220 controller paired with the newest 176-layer 3D TLC flash from Micron. A DRAM cache is not available for the mapping tables of the SSD—a reasonable cost optimization for a solid-state drive targeting today's consumer workloads.

The ADATA XPG Atom 50 is only available in one capacity: 1 TB, for $120 as mentioned before. Endurance is set to 640 TBW for this model, ADATA includes a five-year warranty with the Atom 50.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the ADATA XPG Atom 50 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and two flash chips. The other side of the PCB is empty.


Inside the package, you'll find this metal heatspreader heatsink. It's not preattached, but installation is super easy. Just peel off the tape and stick it onto your SSD. Our thermal testing later in this review shows that the heatsink isn't required at all, as there is no throttling even without the heatsink.

Chip Component Analysis

This is the first time we're testing an SSD with the Innogrit IG5220 RainierQX controller. This controller is optimized for low-cost Gen 4 designs without DRAM and manufactured on a 12 nanometer production process.


The two flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. They have been rebranded by ADATA. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.

Test Setup