Photos and Features

The XPG line is ADATA’s gaming lineup so the mostly black packaging with red trim makes sense and fits along with that theme. The box has an actual picture of the drive on the front which is unusual but nice to see. I am surprised however they didn’t use a picture of the drive with the included heatspreader. Anyhow the model name is down in the bottom left corner along with the M.2 length of 2280. They also have the PCIe lanes here as this is an x2 PCIe lanes drive. The bottom right corner has the drives capacity, in our case, it is a 256GB drive, but it is available from 128 up to 1TB. Then they touch on the tech behind the drive with the 3D NAND badge as well as the NVMe 1.2 badge up in the top right corner. Around on the back, they list a few of the basic technologies and then repeat them across 22 different languages, this fills up a lot of the back of the packaging. I was surprised that they have the drive speeds listed back here, especially when there weren’t any other specifications. Then they have the 5 Year badge for the 5-year warranty that they provide.

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Inside the packaging, the XPG SX6000 comes in a formed plastic tray that has the drive snapped into place. They kept packaging down by not needing a second tray lid. Also in the box but not in the picture, they did include the add on heatspreader separate from the drive itself.

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Without the included heatspreader installed the drive does have a standard M.2 sticker on it as well. It is a little short but it has the XPG by ADATA branding on the top. Below that is the full model name as well as capacity. Then from there, you have the full model number and below that the serial number as well as a bar code for the serial number as well. The regulatory logos are all there at the bottom and they have a warranty is void if removed on there as well.

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Ignoring the warranty void if removed part of the sticker, I pulled it off to get a closer look at what makes the SX6000 tick. There are four main components on this side. Right in the middle, the smallest chip is the NANYA NT5CC64M16GP-D11 which is a DDR3L SDRAM chip used to store the address translation table. From what I can tell it runs at 800MHz and has a capacity of 1GB which when we consider that there is a second matching chip makes for a lot more RAM than a 256GB SSD should need. The two ADATA branded chips on the left are the NAND. The SX6000 is using 3D TLC based on 16nm with a model number of  60077107 under the ADATA branding. This doesn’t come up online but I do know they are produced by Micron and given the 256GB drive size and having two we know they are 128GB. Then over on the right, the silver chip is the drive's controller. They went with the Realtek's RTS5760 which from what I can tell ADATA has been the only company to use. There aren’t many companies making SSD controllers and Realtek trying to get into the market is good to see, but a lot of companies like to stick with is what is known which is why I think you don’t see the Realtek's RTS5760 getting used a lot.

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The back of the SX6000 doesn’t have too much going on. There is room for two additional NAND chips back here for use on the larger capacity SX6000 models but the 256GB model tested doesn’t have a need for them. So the only thing interesting back here is the second 1GB DDR3 DRAM chip. Normally you would see smaller capacity drives also drop their DRAM capacity down to match the NAND capacity so it is weird to see this drive still have the second one that is most likely only needed with those two additional NAND chips.

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So I mentioned the heatspreader a few times and here it is. I’m using the term heatspreader lightly as typically they would have more thickness but with M.2 drives you can’t always fit thicker drives, especially in laptops. I suspect that is why the SX6000 doesn’t come with it installed. It is just a thin metal sticker really with a pull off paper on the back. You then just stick it on the drive over the original sticker so it is visible when installed.

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It does make a surprisingly big difference in the overall look of the drive though. M.2 drives don’t really have the room to look good so normally you just have to be happy with a drive that uses a black PCB and doesn’t have a really ugly model sticker. But the SX6000 does look sharp, of course, a lot of motherboards have been moving to putting the M.2 on the back or under a heatsink. But if your build doesn’t, this will look good with a basic black finish and the XPG branding being most prominent. I normally don’t like big branding, but I prefer this over the bare drive for sure.

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