Review on 💾 ADATA Swordfish 250GB Internal SSD - 3D NAND PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe M.2 2280 - Read/Write Speed up to 1800/1200MB/s (ASWORDFISH-250G-C) by Derek Helvie

I have the 2TB FALCON and SWORDFISH versions. Both have TLC flash, which is almost always better than QLC, so good there. Both have a decent 960TB endurance for a cheap drive, some say it's low but I'd rate it as 'good'. These are both DRAM-free SSDs, meaning less power for laptops, but also lower performance. IOPS are "good" for a consumer drive, they are similar to SSDs. Claimed sequential read speeds of 1800 MB/s and write speeds of 1200 MB/s seem to be sufficient for small sequential jobs on SWORDFISH, while FALCON actually achieves just over 3300 MB/s read and 1500 MB/s write! Both use a certain number of their TLC cells as fast SLC cache, which is pretty good until you hit the cache limit, which is pretty generous. Tom's hardware says it's up to 1/3 of the *remaining* unused capacity. Yes, when I was copying a lot of files to my new SWORDFISH, the hard drive speed dropped to around 120MB/s while the drive was full! Honestly, this is closer to QLC's speed. Judging by the reviews, FALCON doesn't slow down that much, but I haven't checked. (I had no need, FALCON is on another computer/in use, and I just didn't need to fill it up with a large sequential write file. I probably won't use it that way.) Drives that use the SLC cache will be deleted after wiping of the SLC cache restored, so everyday use if ok, and again only a problem for very large copies. But yes, there are reasons that Samsung's 970 and 980 Pro don't drop much at all when writing to 4WD. I'd say this is a great *capacity* upgrade, especially for older PCIe 3.0 laptops. FALCON is odd in that it has a very high sequential read speed but a much slower write speed. The much faster sequential read speed is the only real advantage FALCON has over SWORDFISH, but they have the same IOPS rating which determines how a drive performs in terms of response, allowing FALCON to bring more utility to regular users, if you occasionally copy a lot of large files. If prices are close then go for the FALCON, but if it's just a work laptop there shouldn't be much of a difference. Reviews in the trade press show that loading times for gamers have increased slightly, according to fwiw.