ADATA's XPG Atom 50 ($119.99 in its sole capacity, 1TB) is the flagship of the company's new line of internal solid-state drives for gamers and creators. This PCI Express 4.0 drive provides good performance but is easy on the wallet. Like an atom, it is compact (it can easily fit in the tightest laptop M.2 slot, or Sony's PlayStation 5 console) but packs plenty of power under the right conditions. The Atom 50 replaces the ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite as our Editors' Choice award winner among budget internal SSDs.

Composition of an Atom: TLC and DRAM-Free Memory

The XPG Atom 50 is a PCIe 4x4 drive manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" printed circuit board. It employs the NVMe 1.4 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus, features an InnoGrit IG5220 (RainierQX) controller, and is rated for a maximum throughput of 5,000MBps read and 4,500MBps write. The drive is based on Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The Atom 50's controller eschews the usual DRAM cache, enlisting instead your PC's own memory as a host memory buffer (HMB). (Check out our glossary of SSD terms if some of this lingo is new to you.)

While leaving DRAM out helps minimize a drive's cost, it has the potential to slow the drive down. As we shall see, that is definitely not the case with the Atom 50 for the kinds of operations we tested it with.

An aluminum heat spreader helps keep this power-efficient drive, which draws no more than 2.5 watts, running smoothly. The shield is thin enough (less than a millimeter thick) that the Atom 50 can fit into a PS5 or thin-clearance laptop with room to spare.

As mentioned, the XPG Atom 50 is the top model in ADATA's Atom line of budget drives geared to gamers and creators. The Atom 30 and 40 are both PCI Express 3 drives, while the Atom 50 rules the roost as a PCIe 4 device. Currently, the Atom 50 is only available with a capacity of 1TB, though the company promises a 2TB stick later this year.

In terms of pricing, the Atom 50 lists at 12 cents per gigabyte, 3 cents a gig less than the Mushkin Delta, but at this writing their prices are nearly identical (within a penny per gigabyte of each other) at Amazon retail prices. However, the Delta's benchmark scores proved middling at best, and its durability was low—just 400TBW (terabytes written) for the 2TB drive we tested. That's typical of SSDs with QLC-based memory, which is less durable than the TLC memory found in the Atom 50. TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, so when the 2TB Atom 50 is released, its ratingshould be about 1,300TBW.

The ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite, our former budget SSD champ, can be found for as little as 11 cents per gigabyte. However, the S50 Lite is on a lower speed tier than the Atom 50, with sequential speed ratings of 3,900MBps read and 3,200MBps write. It generally posted lower scores than the Atom 50 in our other benchmarks.

Many budget (and some higher-end) drives skimp on security features, but not the Atom 50, which provides AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption as well as LDPC (Low Density Parity Check Code).

Testing the Atom 50: Fast at Game Loading and Everyday Tasks

We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete graphics card.

We put the XPG Atom 50 through our usual suite of internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and AS-SSD. Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.

PCMark 10's overall storage test measures a drive's speed in performing a variety of everyday storage tasks, while the so-called PCMark 10 trace results measure its mettle for specific tasks such as OS booting, loading creative programs and games, and copying both small and large files.

In the PCMark 10 overall benchmark, the Atom 50 turned in a very respectable score of 2,771. There isn't always a direct correlation between a PCMark 10 overall score and a drive's rated sequential read and write speeds, but it was heartening to see the Atom 50 outperform some speedier drives, including the blazingly fast ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade. Even better, it excelled in the Windows 10 boot trace test, as well as in loading Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. It also did well in the other game-loading traces and in loading creative apps (Adobe Photoshop and Premier Pro), while turning in average results on the copy tests.

In Crystal DiskMark testing, we primarily look to see how a drive's sequential read and write speeds compare with its rated speeds. Happily, both the Atom 50's timed read speed of 5,045MBps and write speed of 4,812MBps exceeded its ratings.

One Sizzling Budget Drive

Easily meeting its rated sequential read and write speeds and proving adept at launching programs, the ADATA XPG Atom 50 chalked up surprisingly good performance numbers for a DRAM-less PCI Express 4 drive considering its modest price point. With a paper-thin heat spreader, the Atom 50 can easily fit in a PlayStation 5. It even provides the gold-standard AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, which you'll seldom see in lower-priced SSDs. The Atom 50 is an easy choice as our latest top budget internal SSD pick.