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Comparison Products
The QLC drive of the hour is the Crucial P310, a more recent release that threatens to take market share from existing budget drives. The Kingston NV3 is a stalwart opponent in this arena, usually coming with QLC flash, even though our release sample used TLC. Technically, the P310 is replacing the popular P3 Plus, which uses the same hardware as the Corsair MP600 Core XT. The FA200, like the P310, is capable of pumping out more bandwidth, which can translate to improved overall performance.
We then look at drives that share the FA200’s controller but have different flash memory. This includes the Addlink A93 with YMTC TLC flash, and the Klevv CRAS C925 with rarer SK hynix TLC. We also have the Inland TN470, which shows off Phison’s comparable E27T controller. These drives are all roughly in the same class and can perform similarly; however, price and flash capacity must factor into your decision. QLC flash might yield the same performance for what you intend to do with the drive, but if you’re not saving money, then why not go with TLC?
We also want to demonstrate how this drive compares to some of the better PCIe 4.0 drives. We would generally recommend the Samsung 990 Pro, but the 4TB 990 Pro is specifically the best drive to compare, as it’s likely the best 4TB PCIe 4.0 drive on the market. To save money, many people opt to keep the DRAM but switch to an older platform, such as Phison’s E18. The Netac NV7000 is a fair representative of this controller in a mature state. The E18 remains a popular choice for “budget” capacity – we mention the MSI M480 Pro in our conclusion – despite being a higher-end platform on paper. The E18 has recently been known to experience a read performance issue in some cases, but firmware is being or will be released to address this issue.
Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark
Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.
A 4TB DRAM-less budget drive? Yep, it’s good for games. The FA200 has more than adequate performance to minimize your load times. QLC flash, which the FA200 uses, is perhaps best suited for drives like this, where you get the most space for your dollar. Best for games, storage, and other tasks where you write little but read often. The FA200 is a bit outdated here, though, as the newer P310 and Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 go a step further on performance. The FA200 needs to beat them on price to make sense. That said, at least there’s little to no reason to spend more on a TLC flash drive for gaming, so you can narrow your prospects if needed.
Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.
The FA200 is somewhat more disappointing in PCMark 10. This real-world, everyday application benchmark favors higher-end drives, such as the 990 Pro, and shuns older QLC-based options, like the MP600 Core XT. The FA200 falls somewhere in between the worst and best QLC drives, which complicates things. We would suggest a TLC-based drive for your application workloads, but if you're on a budget or need more space, a QLC drive could suffice. In that case, you should probably go for something that can maximize the PCIe 4.0 interface, like the FA200, rather than the older P3 Plus class of drives. As before, though, the FA200 would need to be less expensive than the P310 and Blue SN5100.
Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers
The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.
Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.
QLC drives like the FA200 make a lot of sense for the PS5. They’re the best way to get a decent amount of storage at usually the lowest price per TB. 4TB is also a realistic cap for DRAM-less drives. Although slower drives can meet the PS5’s requirements, having one that can fully push the PCIe 4.0 interface like the FA200 ensures you never feel like you’re failing to reach your maximum potential. The graphene headspreading label also means you can do without the hassle of adding a heatsink, which can also save you some money.
Transfer Rates — DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.
DiskBench is one of our non-synthetic tests as it uses real files in a direct transfer. It does bank on pSLC cache performance, which is why the QLC-based P310 and FA200 manage to come out on top. If you’re not doing massive transfers, you really don’t need TLC flash. Any SSD that can reach near-top PCIe 4.0 performance levels will handle everyday transfers just fine. The FA200 is one such drive despite its budget nature.
Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark
ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.
Let’s start with ATTO. The FA200 doesn’t impress here, as many other drives have higher throughput where it matters, at higher block or I/O sizes. QLC-based SSDs are often used as a replacement for HDDs, and what are HDDs best at? Sustained, sequential transfers of larger files. That said, the FA200 is still fast enough if it’s your secondary storage drive. It only has one noticeable dip for 1MiB reads, and it’s likely because of the controller being used. The Maxio MAP1602 is on other drives that exhibit a similar drop, including the A93 and the CRAS C925. I think you’ll agree that this is a worthwhile trade-off for being able to buy a 4TB SSD at an affordable price.
And the FA200 does fine enough in CrystalDiskMark’s sequential tests, especially at the more realistic QD1. It’s average to above average both there and with the random read/write latency tests. It can’t match the 990 Pro for reads or beat the P310 or MP600 Core XT for writes, but its performance is certainly good enough. We can’t ignore that the FA200 doesn’t quite feel as up-to-date as the P310 or WD Blue SN5100, but if it comes in at a lower price point – especially at 4TB – then we would recommend it as a cost-saving measure if you just need extra fast storage.
Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.
We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.
The 4TB FA200 initially writes in a faster, single-bit pSLC mode that temporarily leverages capacity for speed. This mode averages 5.54 GB/s over 190 seconds. The drive writes faster for the first two seconds – approximately 12GB of data – and then somewhat slower for the next 188 seconds, for a cache that fills the entire drive. The first part of the cache acts like a static cache, as you’d find in hybrid schemes such as WD’s nCache and Samsung’s TurboWrite, with the rest being dynamic for the remaining extent of the drive. 4TB of 4-bit QLC flash turns into about 1TB of 1-bit pSLC, but the dynamic cache will diminish in size as the drive is filled.
Our understanding is that this controller does not actually use any static cache, which makes sense if you compare the cache size to WD’s – the WD cache is massive but not quite the size of the entire drive. This means the temporary uplift at the start is probably meant only to imitate that sort of mode because such a mode is ideal for caching a burst of random writes, which are often small in nature. If you already know that your drive will have a massive cache, then it’s worth having a slower sustained pSLC speed with a special mode to handle random writes. QLC flash drives are not really meant to get hammered with writes, and having a somewhat reduced sustained write speed can reduce wear when combined with this strategy. This may or may not be the case, but our results appear to support the hypothesis.
Once the cache is exhausted, the drive is forced to write to the native QLC flash and, in fact, must fold data in order to free up space for additional writes. Folding is slower because the controller must wait for writes to be moved from pSLC to QLC before it can accept more incoming writes from the user. This is usually about half the speed of the native flash, but that is only a rule of thumb. The reality is that the performance impact depends on many things, and not only is the sustained write speed affected – mixed workloads where you might be requesting reads will face increased latency, which is one reason QLC flash drives like this can, in their worst state, effectively freeze up and feel laggy. That is one good reason that drives like the FA200 are best for read-heavy workloads, being optimal for storage and games.
Power Consumption and Temperature
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.
Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.
For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.
One of the greatest revolutions in SSDs has been the incredible improvement in power efficiency, which started mostly with PCIe 4.0 drives. The PCIe 3.0 SK hynix Gold P31 warrants an honorable mention. The FA200 is almost 40% more efficient than that drive, which shows how far we’ve come. SSDs have long been a good choice over HDDs for reduced power consumption, which has benefited laptops more than anything else. In the era of portable gaming systems, though, the power efficiency gains of PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less drives are more important than ever. Less power means less heat, and heat is the enemy. This is true with the FA200, which only hit 51°C in our testing, although this controller is known to create a hot spot. The graphene solution of the FA200 does an excellent job of mitigating that issue.
Test Bench and Testing Notes
CPU | Row 0 - Cell 2 | |
Motherboard | Row 1 - Cell 2 | |
Memory | Row 2 - Cell 2 | |
Graphics | Intel Iris Xe UHD Graphics 770 | Row 3 - Cell 2 |
CPU Cooling | Row 4 - Cell 2 | |
Case | Row 5 - Cell 2 | |
Power Supply | Row 6 - Cell 2 | |
OS Storage | Row 7 - Cell 2 | |
Operating System | Row 8 - Cell 2 |
We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.
Acer FA200 Bottom Line
We would love to give this drive a higher score, but it simply cannot fully compete with newer QLC drives, such as the Crucial P310 and the Sandisk Blue SN5100. Micron’s QLC flash is better optimized with the Phison E27T, and the BiCS8 QLC of the Blue SN5100 is simply superlative. The P310 has quickly become a fan favorite because it’s widely available in a range of capacities with improving prices. The Blue SN5100 needs to come down in price, but it provides a Black SN7100-like experience with excellent power efficiency and low random read latency. The FA200 is last-gen compared to these and may not be easy to find at an affordable price in all regions.
Even with that put aside, the FA200 still exhibits the poor sustained write performance that many QLC-based drives do. On the whole, it has above-average performance, though, and especially excels in 3DMark and PCMark 10. This makes it great as a secondary drive, a gaming drive, or as extra storage in the PS5. The graphene heatspreading label does a good job of keeping the drive cool, which makes it nice for laptops, too. We don’t really have any complaints there. The problem is that this simply feels like a last-generation drive compared to ones we’ve seen recently because, frankly, it is. Coupled with volatile pricing in the NAND flash and SSD markets, particularly for QLC that is diverted for enterprise use, it’s a difficult sell. Probably the “nail in the coffin” is how affordable the Black SN7100 has been, underlining the fact that TLC flash drives can compete with pricing that is so close. QLC once held a density advantage and may again, but for this generation, it’s rapidly becoming murky.
We gave the identical HP FX700 a higher score in its review, but that is almost two years ago now. If you can find a drive with this hardware – like the recently-reviewed TeamGroup MP44Q – and preferably a nice heatspreader, we can still recommend it as a quick way to add a lot of storage. The FA200 and its peers make sense at 2TB and 4TB if they can save you enough money. However, competitors like the Black SN7100 and TeamGroup MP44 make this a more challenging proposition. At 2TB, at least, the MP44Q can compete, but even then, for 10% more, you can get an MSI M480 Pro.
Still, this hardware can work at 2TB because it’s guaranteed to be the same when you buy it, which isn’t the case with others like the Kingston NV3. So if you’re adding this at the last second or just need a solid SSD in a pinch, the FA200 or its clones are far from terrible. They can no longer command quite the same attention they once did.
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