The explanations along with all of the data was a great way to show insight into both the why and how for the new bench setup.
The only thing I'd like to see is either 900p/905p Optane drives added in and wishful thinking would be p5800x. Even though they're at relatively unattainable prices due to low volume, discontinued and/or being enterprise they do represent nand alternatives with a rather different performance profile. Hopefully Intel will opt to bring another consumer version out once they have broad PCIe 4+ support across their consumer product line.
The 900P and 905P are in line for their turn on the testbed. Those two and the WD Black AN1500 will be the first drives I use the new Quarch PAM for, since that currently only has a fixture for the PCIe add-in card form factor. (I did also run some tests on one of the Optane drives while experimenting to develop this suite, but they haven't run through the final version of the full suite.)
I do think it's a lot more likely that I'll get a P5800X sample than a Micron X100. But it wouldn't surprise me if Intel holds off on press samples until they're ready for it to be reviewed on an Intel platform.
Great to hear, I figured that they just hadn't had their turn yet.
I've assumed that Intel + PCIe 4+ drives were all going to be waiting on Intel's own platforms which is why I still hold out hope for a future consumer Optane.
I too would love to see tests of the Intel P5800X and Micron X100 on this new test platform. In fact, these drives interest me most for OS and software installation.
The 900P and 905P are rather a historical curiosity nowadays due to their slow sequential transfer rates.
Intel also refused to validate its 'storage' drives like the 800p, 900p, and 905p for use as a disk cache. This site posted some interesting results for the 118GB 800p. It made it seem like that drive might actually be relevant for people on a tight budget who need a lot of storage and don't mind the noise of a mechanical hard disk. But, Intel's site has very clear statements saying that only the 'memory' Optane products (which seem to be very pointless for consumers) are supported for cache use.
Wow, very thorough. Phenomenal work. Would there be any interest in testing synchronized writing? (i.e. bypassing the device's volatile write-back cache). In linux this can be done with the oflags sync or dsync. E.g. 4K Random Writes: "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/testfile bs=4k count=10k oflag=sync" Without the oflag, or using oflag=direct; you'd be using the write-back cache, which looks great but comes with reliability risk. See a write-up here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/wal-reliab...
I think I get what you're saying/writing. It's random data, but not being written to random locations on the disk. Any clue how to do the latter? Gosh, that's a plot-thickener of note for me. :-P How random is "random"? :-O
An alternative to this might be a retention or volatility test. So basically hook the SSD up in a way that you can quickly yank out its sata or power cable. Then copy a very big file to it, and immediately after Windows says the copy is done; yank out the data or power cable. Then reboot and do a checksum on the file on the target SSD, and compare to the original, and see if any of them have actually written all the data.
I wish we could edit posts. Grrr. Otherwise if it's an M.2 slot; hit the reset button on the PC immediately after Windows says the file has finished copying. Then compare checksums.
So basically testing power loss resiliency. There in the 1st world power reliability is of no concern, but it's a big concern here in the 3rd world. Power aint reliable like in America.
You can observe the disk's misconduct with the disk LED on your chassis. The disk LED should stop when the file copy is done, but it doesn't - so it still takes time for it to get it onto non-volatile storage. So the data is still floating around in volatile memory while that LED is still on. I have 4 SSDs - for one of them the LED only stays on like a second after the file copy is "done." The others take 5-ish seconds. They all fail in a power cut test - killing power immediately after the OS says the copy is "done." Checked in Windows and Linux. I suspected this was misconduct by Windows, but since I see it in linux too; I'm more confident about it being disk misconduct.
My bad. Actually this LED thing was because of buffered writes by the OS. Using xcopy in windows with the /J parameter avoids this "misconduct." So it is actually the OS behaving badly. Now to just figure out how to force all writes to be unbuffered.... Even using unbuffered writing; my SSDs still fail my power cut test - parts of the file sit in volatile memory for too long after the copy is "done" and the file gets corrupted on the destination disk.
Woohoo! Finally solved this by mounting partitions in linux using the "sync" option. I knew TLC chips were insanely slow, but damn - less than 1MB/s sequential writing is madness. At least I'm getting 10MB/s sequential with my old MLC chips. So it was the doing of the OS all long. Multiple layers of caching make a tortoise storage medium look like a rabbit.
Won't add any more posts/spam. Just wish I could consolidate into 1.
How is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X system being run without a GPU? That chip doesn't have integrated video so generally I expect it would fail at Post with beep codes. AFAIK none of the AMD APUs have PCI-E 4 support so I don't think there is a way to use integrated video and support PCI-E 4. I mean it doesn't need much of a video card and the 580 in the other system is probably overkill for storage testing but it seems like it would need something even if it's installed in one of the PCI-e 3 lanes hanging off the chipset instead of the 4.0 lane off the cpu.
You can run Ryzen headless without issues on many motherboards, while some will indeed refuse to boot. MSI apparently provides a BIOS that has the error disabled so it works headless if you ask them.
I set up the testbed with an old 5450 I had lying around, and once all the software was configured I pulled the GPU back out. (That ancient GPU interferes with suspend, which is needed to unlock drives so they can be secure erased.) The system boots without complaint with no GPU, and I use SSH and RDP to run the tests. I'm keeping the 580 in the other system for now because I want to work on getting some application or gaming tests working on that machine when I have spare time.
I should mention that I have had a bit of trouble booting the ASRock B550 Pro motherboard, because it seems to have half-assed UEFI boot support. The motherboard will forget its boot settings at the slightest provocation, and when that happens it will search for and boot the first Windows it can find. It refuses to detect a Linux bootloader on an internal drive, even if it's in the canonical EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi location on the ESP. So any time this machine decides to forget its boot settings, I have to plug in a GPU and keyboard and boot a Linux off a USB device to re-create the UEFI boot entry for grub.
On the other hand, I was quite surprised to discover that a quad M.2 riser works on this board. Intel would never let PCIe bifurcation be enabled on an entry-level motherboard.
Asus actually bundles a quad NVMe M.2 adapter with their Strix B550-XE, for some absolutely baffling reason. I tried asking the Asus technical marketing rep on Reddit why they did this, but he didn't understand the question. What a weird friggin decision.
I have had the same issue on my old ASRock intel board, on my current MSI AMD board, on my Intel laptop, and on my AMD laptop. People really like writing UEFIs that just randomly boot a windows they find for no reason
I've seen a few AMD boards that have bios options to enable headless operation - basically, setting that option disables the post check for the graphics card. If you're running in native UEFI mode and your operating system doesn't require a GPU, it'll work fine.
Nice write up...;) Seems rather unsurprising that the two PCIe4 drives running in PCIe4 mode (I gather from the test hardware described) were the best overall performing in your tests. Although you described the PCIe/SATA interfaces of most of the drives--I wasn't clear on the Mushkin or the MP400. Also, a more thorough description of the drivers employed would help--open source or proprietary, etc. Linux distro tests, however, would seem to me to be of somewhat less "practical" value than Win10 tests--considering that Win10 is where the overwhelming bulk of these drives will be deployed by the consumers who buy them, I would think. Overall, it's nice to see changes here in AT's testing methodology!
Nice to see another substantial benchmark upgrade, keeping up with this stuff can be mind-boggling at times.
The article could use someproofreading though. Even just the first paragraph: "on accident" -> by accident "holy unified metric" -> wholly-unified metric
Unless religion is somehow involved in benchmarking SSDs 😉
Great to see this updated test suite. Would love to see popular SSDs like Corsair MX500, BX500 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus incorporated as reference points.
Also, a note to put numbers in perspective (e.g., "in this test, a 10% difference is/isn't significant")—like in sound measurements where we know +10 dB is twice the perceived sound and we have dB(A), in SSD measurements what amount of difference matters in different scenarii (data loaders, gamers, office use...)?
Very nice. Also nice to see some additional validation of the SK Hynix Gold P31 results. My only complaint with that SSD, which I installed in my XPS 17 9700, is that it does not support hardware encryption with bitlocker. There is definitely a significant performance penalty when testing performance in Crystal Disk Mark with software encryption enabled and disabled. Sad times.
Well one of your writers certainly do. I pointed out that it's incorrect to write 2TB, 2MB, 2MHz, 2mm etc. and that it's incorrect to write 2Mb when you mean 2 MB (megabyte), and that I was surprised to see such a lack of consistency on Anandtech. *Deleted*.
For those not getting it, the ISO standard, IEC and writing it as a proper SI unit all specify that the numerical value always precedes the unit, and that is always used to separate the unit from the number.
One thing that bothers me about benchmarks in general is that they often don't show the statistics normalized against the cost of the thing being measured. For example, I'd like to see iops/$, or GBs/$, or ???/$ in all your tables and charts. I think you've sometime done this in the past, but it should become a regular feature of every review.
Prices are so volatile in the market (and sometimes even regional) that a static number here doesn't make sense imo. The periodic roundups of recommended drives do take price and performance into account.
@Billy Thank you for the detailed test and the explanation of each procedure.
There is one thing that I am missing in this test. How does a drive perform in heavy and light, if it is 80 or 90% full? Is it closer to a fresh drive or closer to full drive? Maybe you can run a drive in that precondition. Not as a general test, but just once to show how a drive behaves.
Great article. I particularly agree with the use of 80% full because that's a lot more realistic than empty drive testing. In fact, I would skip empty drive testing and stick with 60% and 80% full tests.
• Having three Samsung drives out of nine shown seems like an ad for Samsung, even if that wasn't the intention. That Samsung is a popular brand is not a good reason. OCZ used to be popular and the company's bad practices caught up with it.
• Please test the Inland brand drives. People can find Samsung drive tests all over the Internet. I'm not saying don't test them, of course. I am asking that you provide significantly more added value to your SSD reviews by reviewing drives almost no one else reviews. For instance, I recently purchased the 2 TB Inland Performance Plus drive, which uses the Phison E18 controller. It should provide very good performance but reviews would help.
Another issue with brands like Inland is firmware updates. Sandforce, the most infamously poor-quality SSD controller outfit, finally (they claimed) fixed a serious bug in their second-generation controller years ago and OCZ released yet another firmware update. Yet, other brands were sold using the controller and the OCZ tool wouldn't recognize them so they could be patched. Sandforce, of course, never bothered to provide a utility for patching these other brands' drives.
This issue isn't so severe if the consumer just happened to have purchased a Sandforce drive from a vendor that sometimes makes the effort to create patches, like Intel. But, it's really inexcusable to have such a caveat emptor attitude that one doesn't make a strong effort to warn consumers about any risks involved in buying drives from less dominant brands. Phison, for instance, has reportedly been working on improving the firmware for the E18. Will Inland ever receive a patch? I haven't looked much into it but when I did a a few cursory searches about Inland and firmware patches over the years it seemed that it was the typical "off brand" situation — where the drives are stuck forever with their initial firmware.
That's not such a severe problem if the firmware is decent to begin with (unlike OCZ, which, despite dozens of updates never fixed the Vertex 2 drive at all) — but it's something Anandtech should be and should have been raising awareness about. Your site covered OCZ's bait and switch tactics (when it switched 32-bit NAND in the Vertex 2 for 64-bit NAND, causing the drives to brick randomly — especially when put to sleep), which was great.
But, unless I missed it I haven't seen any articles about the drawbacks of purchasing SSDs from smaller brands. And, why not put some pressure on the industry to stop enabling companies like Sandforce to not provide utilities to patch their drives (and utilities to un-brick them when they go into 'panic mode'). It was completely inexcusable — the industry silence around that. Sandforce made it much more important to brick the drive when there was a software glitch, no matter how minor, apparently to 'protect its IP'. Shouldn't the consumer's data be considered the priority? Well, they came out with a not-at-all-conflict-of-interest partnership with DriveSavers. That's right — you get the joy of a drive that will brick at any moment and then you can spend thousands to 'protect the vaunted Sandforce IP' and pad its pockets and DriveSavers'.
The tech press is supposed to protect us from caveat emptor. So, please... start reviewing smaller brands, start providing a bigger picture than the latest from Samsung, and put more pressure on industry players (like Inland) to do the right things, like keeping their drives' firmware current.
Speaking of bad practices, let's take a look at Samsung.
1. The company breaks industry convention and intentionally confuses consumers by labeling QLC drives "MLC", and TLC drives as well. That's an example of fraud which is, unfortunately, legal.
There should have been an article from every tech site condemning this. I don't recall seeing even one. You know, it's not too late, either!
2. The company posted fantasy power consumption figures for drives like the 830 and the tech press and companies like Newegg dutifully posted those specs. Samsung sold a lot of drives based on word of mouth — about how amazingly efficient its drives were, based on those nonsensical power usage claims.
3. The company released its planar TLC drives in such an under-engineered (half-baked) state that they had to be kludged into frequently rewriting stored data to keep their performance somewhat acceptable. The steady state performance of the 128 GB 840 drive earned particular, fully justified, scorn from HardOCP.
All SSDs with a Phison controllers are the same - designed and assembled by Phison. Sure, there are some FW differences as every customer can request customisations, but at a high-level an SSD with a Phison controller is a Phison SSD. None of the small brands produce their own SSDs, they simply work with Phison and other similar ODMs who offer turnkey solutions. Anyone can start their own brand if they have enough capital to meet the MOQ requirements.
It was different 10 years ago when there were numerous incumbent controller and SSD vendors shipping new designs every 6-12 months ago. At that time, it was never sure what to expect and at AT we were more or less a validation partner even. Nowadays there are a few large factories pumping out stuff with different labels.
The Sandforce 2200 controller was used by a bunch of different companies but to my knowledge it’s not possible to patch that bug if one owns one of the smaller brands’ drives. It’s unlikely enough to get OCZ’ utility to recognize its own drives, let alone another vendor’s.
So, even if the controller is the same and even if the other hardware is standard, is there a standard utility that can be used with any drive made by any brand? Sandforce never seemed to bother to offer anything like that and there were a lot of different brands using its controllers.
Also, even when a controller is standard the firmware may not be, as in the case of Intel’s Sandforce drives as far as I know.
Samsung's over-represented in this article mainly because they're one of the few companies still sampling new SATA drives for review, and I didn't want to have the SATA market segments represented by old 64-layer drives that you can no longer purchase.
As for the Inland drives: I don't have any easy way to get samples of a large number of their drives. I strongly prefer not wasting time re-testing the same drive with a different brand's sticker. I do plan to soon have full results for E12+TLC, E12S+QLC, E16+TLC, E16+QLC drives in Bench, and I'll be getting an E18 sample soon. They won't all be from the same brand, but the results will be generally representative of the equivalents from other Phison-based brands.
I also wish the smaller SSD brands did a better job of making firmware updates available. That is definitely a valid reason for preferring some brands over others. It's a little hard to evaluate vendors on the timeliness of their firmware update releases at product launch, and I've never made it a priority to systematically compare vendors on this post-launch.
Part of why it's been a low priority has been because it seems like firmware updates are generally not as important these days. When a controller is first launched there are often a few updates to optimize performance, but those usually don't have a big impact on the overall standings of a drive. Firmware updates to fix critical bugs seem to be thankfully less common. And for users who really do care about making sure they've got the absolute latest firmware on their Phison drives, you can usually find a way to apply the update using a different vendor's tool—not ideal by any means, but it works.
I'd like an article that has all the Inland drives. All of them. Micro Center has an entire case devoted to them and they've been available on Amazon for quite some time.
Why is it that, when I go to look for a review, I find just one TechPowerUp review of just one drive in just one size?
It's really a silly situation, particularly considering that, unless I've missed something, the brand has never offered a firmware update + secure erase tool for its drives.
It has, and the results are in Bench. I'll be writing up a full review for the SN850 soon, but for this article I wanted to use drives that had also been through the old test suite so I could know what to expect when debugging the new test suite.
Great article! I would love to see a few more older drives added for reference (maybe a 970 Pro, WD Black, 970 Evo Plus), plus several of the other PCIe 4 drives now on the market - Sabrent Rocket/Plus/Q4, Corsair MP600/Pro/Core, Seagate Firecuda and Gigabyte Aorus. Thanks!
The back catalog of drives will all be tested eventually. I'm currently prioritizing drives based on what comparison data I'll need for the next several reviews.
Seagate FireCuda 510 and 520 are already in Bench with partial results. Sabrent Rocket Q4 is currently on the testbed, and the 8TB Rocket Q will get its turn at some point (it takes a long time to test large QLC drives). The Corsair MP600 CORE is in line, and the MP600 PRO will be when it arrives. I try not to spend all my time re-testing the same Phison hardware from different brands, so you won't be able to get results for all of the drives from all of your favorite brands. That makes for painfully boring reviews, and most brands aren't interested in sampling drives just to contribute to Bench without a full review.
Be nice to see a roundup of all those ultra cheap SSD brands you see on Amazon all the time. I've bought one or two for test/pre builds and such and to be honest a few years later they are all still trucking.
PCIe4 SSD is nearly 2x the price of PCIe3 where I am. I am willing to pay for performance if it's worth it but I really can't tell from this article.
Also, I read that the upcoming DirectStorage will require PCIe4 but I have yet found anything to explain why. If that were the case then it's really no debate on what to get for a new build.
I really doubt DirectStorage will require PCIe 4 SSDs. There will probably be at least a subset of DirectStorage functionality that doesn't even require NVMe.
While it likely won't require PCIe 4 SSDs I'm assuming DirectStorage will finally be the thing that makes PCIe 4 SSDs worth the extra cost. I keep going back and forth on buying a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro or if I should pocket the difference and get a WD Black 750. Obviously the 980 is a better drive (just looking at the bench!) but I am hoping that the additional queues in the PCIe 4 SSDs will really show their value later with DirectStorage.
I'd love to see the PCIe 4.0 drives tested at PCIe 3.0 speeds, to see how much of the performance advantage is really down to link rate vs. just newer controllers and NAND.
Inland Performance Plus is this the M.2 NVMe with a built-in heatsink? M.2 is a well-established standard with exact dimensions for everything including the screw hole. However, the standard does not include any heatsink and thus any M.2 you find with a heatsink on is a gamble in terms of compatibility.
Reviews don't really help with that because it's impossible to test comptiability in +100 motherboards in all sorts of configurations.
Mr. Tallis, I'd appreciate some advice from you about the spare area of an SSD and how it impacts performance. I have a question about the numbers in this picture:
I understand that an SSD has high performance when it is empty, and the performance drops off when it is full. I have two questions:
1. How much spare area do you leave on the SSDs for the full "Heavy" benchmark?
2. As a rule of thumb, how much spare area do you think needs to be left on an SSD so the performance will stay closer to the empty numbers and it will not degrade significantly, like in the full numbers
Perhaps I missed it if it is being done. I'd like to see benchmarks on drives that support hardware encryption with the encryption enabled. Several new ones coming out at the end of this month now will support hardware encryption. That would be a good time to do testing with encryption enabled.
how is 2 years old Kingston a2000 compared to Samsung 980. i guess except sequential read write which is higher in Samsung 980 , random read write might be lower than Kingston . Also Kingston consumes less power than Samsung 980 as per data sheet.
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thestryker - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
The explanations along with all of the data was a great way to show insight into both the why and how for the new bench setup.The only thing I'd like to see is either 900p/905p Optane drives added in and wishful thinking would be p5800x. Even though they're at relatively unattainable prices due to low volume, discontinued and/or being enterprise they do represent nand alternatives with a rather different performance profile. Hopefully Intel will opt to bring another consumer version out once they have broad PCIe 4+ support across their consumer product line.
Billy Tallis - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
The 900P and 905P are in line for their turn on the testbed. Those two and the WD Black AN1500 will be the first drives I use the new Quarch PAM for, since that currently only has a fixture for the PCIe add-in card form factor. (I did also run some tests on one of the Optane drives while experimenting to develop this suite, but they haven't run through the final version of the full suite.)I do think it's a lot more likely that I'll get a P5800X sample than a Micron X100. But it wouldn't surprise me if Intel holds off on press samples until they're ready for it to be reviewed on an Intel platform.
thestryker - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Great to hear, I figured that they just hadn't had their turn yet.I've assumed that Intel + PCIe 4+ drives were all going to be waiting on Intel's own platforms which is why I still hold out hope for a future consumer Optane.
Greg100 - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
I too would love to see tests of the Intel P5800X and Micron X100 on this new test platform.In fact, these drives interest me most for OS and software installation.
The 900P and 905P are rather a historical curiosity nowadays due to their slow sequential transfer rates.
p1esk - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
AFAIK 905p still destroys any modern drive in random reads/writes. Also, it does not degrade like other drives when their cache is full.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Shame about the ridiculous pricing, though.Intel also refused to validate its 'storage' drives like the 800p, 900p, and 905p for use as a disk cache. This site posted some interesting results for the 118GB 800p. It made it seem like that drive might actually be relevant for people on a tight budget who need a lot of storage and don't mind the noise of a mechanical hard disk. But, Intel's site has very clear statements saying that only the 'memory' Optane products (which seem to be very pointless for consumers) are supported for cache use.
ksec - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
OH Thank You. Coming here just to comment on P5800X. I am wondering on the power usage the idle time of SSD is so much higher than what I expected.pexxie - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Wow, very thorough. Phenomenal work.Would there be any interest in testing synchronized writing? (i.e. bypassing the device's volatile write-back cache). In linux this can be done with the oflags sync or dsync.
E.g. 4K Random Writes: "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/testfile bs=4k count=10k oflag=sync"
Without the oflag, or using oflag=direct; you'd be using the write-back cache, which looks great but comes with reliability risk. See a write-up here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/wal-reliab...
linuxgeex - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
That's not 4K random writes you're testing. It's sequential writing of pseudorandom data generated by the kernel.pexxie - Wednesday, February 3, 2021 - link
I think I get what you're saying/writing. It's random data, but not being written to random locations on the disk. Any clue how to do the latter? Gosh, that's a plot-thickener of note for me. :-P How random is "random"? :-Odrmaddogs - Saturday, June 19, 2021 - link
Random is measured by Chaos measures. Turing had it best. And AI mimics this like the human brain.pexxie - Friday, February 12, 2021 - link
I was hoping to hear more from the linux fundi. :-(I guess criticism is easy, guidance takes effort. :-P
pexxie - Saturday, February 13, 2021 - link
An alternative to this might be a retention or volatility test. So basically hook the SSD up in a way that you can quickly yank out its sata or power cable. Then copy a very big file to it, and immediately after Windows says the copy is done; yank out the data or power cable. Then reboot and do a checksum on the file on the target SSD, and compare to the original, and see if any of them have actually written all the data.pexxie - Saturday, February 13, 2021 - link
I wish we could edit posts. Grrr.Otherwise if it's an M.2 slot; hit the reset button on the PC immediately after Windows says the file has finished copying. Then compare checksums.
pexxie - Saturday, February 13, 2021 - link
So basically testing power loss resiliency. There in the 1st world power reliability is of no concern, but it's a big concern here in the 3rd world. Power aint reliable like in America.pexxie - Saturday, February 13, 2021 - link
You can observe the disk's misconduct with the disk LED on your chassis. The disk LED should stop when the file copy is done, but it doesn't - so it still takes time for it to get it onto non-volatile storage. So the data is still floating around in volatile memory while that LED is still on. I have 4 SSDs - for one of them the LED only stays on like a second after the file copy is "done." The others take 5-ish seconds. They all fail in a power cut test - killing power immediately after the OS says the copy is "done." Checked in Windows and Linux. I suspected this was misconduct by Windows, but since I see it in linux too; I'm more confident about it being disk misconduct.pexxie - Saturday, February 13, 2021 - link
My bad. Actually this LED thing was because of buffered writes by the OS. Using xcopy in windows with the /J parameter avoids this "misconduct." So it is actually the OS behaving badly. Now to just figure out how to force all writes to be unbuffered....Even using unbuffered writing; my SSDs still fail my power cut test - parts of the file sit in volatile memory for too long after the copy is "done" and the file gets corrupted on the destination disk.
pexxie - Sunday, February 14, 2021 - link
Woohoo! Finally solved this by mounting partitions in linux using the "sync" option. I knew TLC chips were insanely slow, but damn - less than 1MB/s sequential writing is madness. At least I'm getting 10MB/s sequential with my old MLC chips. So it was the doing of the OS all long. Multiple layers of caching make a tortoise storage medium look like a rabbit.Won't add any more posts/spam. Just wish I could consolidate into 1.
kpb321 - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
How is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X system being run without a GPU? That chip doesn't have integrated video so generally I expect it would fail at Post with beep codes. AFAIK none of the AMD APUs have PCI-E 4 support so I don't think there is a way to use integrated video and support PCI-E 4. I mean it doesn't need much of a video card and the 580 in the other system is probably overkill for storage testing but it seems like it would need something even if it's installed in one of the PCI-e 3 lanes hanging off the chipset instead of the 4.0 lane off the cpu.frbeckenbauer - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
You can run Ryzen headless without issues on many motherboards, while some will indeed refuse to boot. MSI apparently provides a BIOS that has the error disabled so it works headless if you ask them.Billy Tallis - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
I set up the testbed with an old 5450 I had lying around, and once all the software was configured I pulled the GPU back out. (That ancient GPU interferes with suspend, which is needed to unlock drives so they can be secure erased.) The system boots without complaint with no GPU, and I use SSH and RDP to run the tests. I'm keeping the 580 in the other system for now because I want to work on getting some application or gaming tests working on that machine when I have spare time.Billy Tallis - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
I should mention that I have had a bit of trouble booting the ASRock B550 Pro motherboard, because it seems to have half-assed UEFI boot support. The motherboard will forget its boot settings at the slightest provocation, and when that happens it will search for and boot the first Windows it can find. It refuses to detect a Linux bootloader on an internal drive, even if it's in the canonical EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi location on the ESP. So any time this machine decides to forget its boot settings, I have to plug in a GPU and keyboard and boot a Linux off a USB device to re-create the UEFI boot entry for grub.DominionSeraph - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
This is the power of AMD.Billy Tallis - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
On the other hand, I was quite surprised to discover that a quad M.2 riser works on this board. Intel would never let PCIe bifurcation be enabled on an entry-level motherboard.Slash3 - Wednesday, February 3, 2021 - link
Asus actually bundles a quad NVMe M.2 adapter with their Strix B550-XE, for some absolutely baffling reason. I tried asking the Asus technical marketing rep on Reddit why they did this, but he didn't understand the question. What a weird friggin decision.https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-strix/rog...
frbeckenbauer - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
I have had the same issue on my old ASRock intel board, on my current MSI AMD board, on my Intel laptop, and on my AMD laptop. People really like writing UEFIs that just randomly boot a windows they find for no reasonkepstin - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
I've seen a few AMD boards that have bios options to enable headless operation - basically, setting that option disables the post check for the graphics card. If you're running in native UEFI mode and your operating system doesn't require a GPU, it'll work fine.Makaveli - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
This was a great article thank you Billy!WaltC - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Nice write up...;) Seems rather unsurprising that the two PCIe4 drives running in PCIe4 mode (I gather from the test hardware described) were the best overall performing in your tests. Although you described the PCIe/SATA interfaces of most of the drives--I wasn't clear on the Mushkin or the MP400. Also, a more thorough description of the drivers employed would help--open source or proprietary, etc. Linux distro tests, however, would seem to me to be of somewhat less "practical" value than Win10 tests--considering that Win10 is where the overwhelming bulk of these drives will be deployed by the consumers who buy them, I would think. Overall, it's nice to see changes here in AT's testing methodology!evilspoons - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Nice to see another substantial benchmark upgrade, keeping up with this stuff can be mind-boggling at times.The article could use someproofreading though. Even just the first paragraph:
"on accident" -> by accident
"holy unified metric" -> wholly-unified metric
Unless religion is somehow involved in benchmarking SSDs 😉
IanCutress - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Some people see sequential reads at QD128 as the 'holy' unified metric ;)Samuel Vimes - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Great to see this updated test suite.Would love to see popular SSDs like Corsair MX500, BX500 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus incorporated as reference points.
Also, a note to put numbers in perspective (e.g., "in this test, a 10% difference is/isn't significant")—like in sound measurements where we know +10 dB is twice the perceived sound and we have dB(A), in SSD measurements what amount of difference matters in different scenarii (data loaders, gamers, office use...)?
oRAirwolf - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Very nice. Also nice to see some additional validation of the SK Hynix Gold P31 results. My only complaint with that SSD, which I installed in my XPS 17 9700, is that it does not support hardware encryption with bitlocker. There is definitely a significant performance penalty when testing performance in Crystal Disk Mark with software encryption enabled and disabled. Sad times.svan1971 - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
where is the fastest 4.0 M.2 ? The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus ?Beaver M. - Monday, February 1, 2021 - link
Deleting critical comments now, are we?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
No comments have been deleted. I only delete them in the most egregious of circumstances, and never for being critical.Deicidium369 - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Thank, I needed a good laugh - I guess contradicting Ian Cutress is egregious - not in this article - but the badly botched Xe HPC write up.Slippery slope leading to Tom's Hardware level of protecting the fee fees of "editors".
Martin84a - Sunday, February 7, 2021 - link
Well one of your writers certainly do. I pointed out that it's incorrect to write 2TB, 2MB, 2MHz, 2mm etc. and that it's incorrect to write 2Mb when you mean 2 MB (megabyte), and that I was surprised to see such a lack of consistency on Anandtech. *Deleted*.Martin84a - Sunday, February 7, 2021 - link
For those not getting it, the ISO standard, IEC and writing it as a proper SI unit all specify that the numerical value always precedes the unit, and that is always used to separate the unit from the number.Martin84a - Tuesday, February 9, 2021 - link
*a space is always used.nobozos - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
One thing that bothers me about benchmarks in general is that they often don't show the statistics normalized against the cost of the thing being measured. For example, I'd like to see iops/$, or GBs/$, or ???/$ in all your tables and charts. I think you've sometime done this in the past, but it should become a regular feature of every review.kepstin - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Prices are so volatile in the market (and sometimes even regional) that a static number here doesn't make sense imo. The periodic roundups of recommended drives do take price and performance into account.KarlKastor - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
@BillyThank you for the detailed test and the explanation of each procedure.
There is one thing that I am missing in this test. How does a drive perform in heavy and light, if it is 80 or 90% full?
Is it closer to a fresh drive or closer to full drive?
Maybe you can run a drive in that precondition. Not as a general test, but just once to show how a drive behaves.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Great article. I particularly agree with the use of 80% full because that's a lot more realistic than empty drive testing. In fact, I would skip empty drive testing and stick with 60% and 80% full tests.• Having three Samsung drives out of nine shown seems like an ad for Samsung, even if that wasn't the intention. That Samsung is a popular brand is not a good reason. OCZ used to be popular and the company's bad practices caught up with it.
• Please test the Inland brand drives. People can find Samsung drive tests all over the Internet. I'm not saying don't test them, of course. I am asking that you provide significantly more added value to your SSD reviews by reviewing drives almost no one else reviews. For instance, I recently purchased the 2 TB Inland Performance Plus drive, which uses the Phison E18 controller. It should provide very good performance but reviews would help.
Another issue with brands like Inland is firmware updates. Sandforce, the most infamously poor-quality SSD controller outfit, finally (they claimed) fixed a serious bug in their second-generation controller years ago and OCZ released yet another firmware update. Yet, other brands were sold using the controller and the OCZ tool wouldn't recognize them so they could be patched. Sandforce, of course, never bothered to provide a utility for patching these other brands' drives.
This issue isn't so severe if the consumer just happened to have purchased a Sandforce drive from a vendor that sometimes makes the effort to create patches, like Intel. But, it's really inexcusable to have such a caveat emptor attitude that one doesn't make a strong effort to warn consumers about any risks involved in buying drives from less dominant brands. Phison, for instance, has reportedly been working on improving the firmware for the E18. Will Inland ever receive a patch? I haven't looked much into it but when I did a a few cursory searches about Inland and firmware patches over the years it seemed that it was the typical "off brand" situation — where the drives are stuck forever with their initial firmware.
That's not such a severe problem if the firmware is decent to begin with (unlike OCZ, which, despite dozens of updates never fixed the Vertex 2 drive at all) — but it's something Anandtech should be and should have been raising awareness about. Your site covered OCZ's bait and switch tactics (when it switched 32-bit NAND in the Vertex 2 for 64-bit NAND, causing the drives to brick randomly — especially when put to sleep), which was great.
But, unless I missed it I haven't seen any articles about the drawbacks of purchasing SSDs from smaller brands. And, why not put some pressure on the industry to stop enabling companies like Sandforce to not provide utilities to patch their drives (and utilities to un-brick them when they go into 'panic mode'). It was completely inexcusable — the industry silence around that. Sandforce made it much more important to brick the drive when there was a software glitch, no matter how minor, apparently to 'protect its IP'. Shouldn't the consumer's data be considered the priority? Well, they came out with a not-at-all-conflict-of-interest partnership with DriveSavers. That's right — you get the joy of a drive that will brick at any moment and then you can spend thousands to 'protect the vaunted Sandforce IP' and pad its pockets and DriveSavers'.
The tech press is supposed to protect us from caveat emptor. So, please... start reviewing smaller brands, start providing a bigger picture than the latest from Samsung, and put more pressure on industry players (like Inland) to do the right things, like keeping their drives' firmware current.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Speaking of bad practices, let's take a look at Samsung.1. The company breaks industry convention and intentionally confuses consumers by labeling QLC drives "MLC", and TLC drives as well. That's an example of fraud which is, unfortunately, legal.
There should have been an article from every tech site condemning this. I don't recall seeing even one. You know, it's not too late, either!
2. The company posted fantasy power consumption figures for drives like the 830 and the tech press and companies like Newegg dutifully posted those specs. Samsung sold a lot of drives based on word of mouth — about how amazingly efficient its drives were, based on those nonsensical power usage claims.
3. The company released its planar TLC drives in such an under-engineered (half-baked) state that they had to be kludged into frequently rewriting stored data to keep their performance somewhat acceptable. The steady state performance of the 128 GB 840 drive earned particular, fully justified, scorn from HardOCP.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
All SSDs with a Phison controllers are the same - designed and assembled by Phison. Sure, there are some FW differences as every customer can request customisations, but at a high-level an SSD with a Phison controller is a Phison SSD. None of the small brands produce their own SSDs, they simply work with Phison and other similar ODMs who offer turnkey solutions. Anyone can start their own brand if they have enough capital to meet the MOQ requirements.It was different 10 years ago when there were numerous incumbent controller and SSD vendors shipping new designs every 6-12 months ago. At that time, it was never sure what to expect and at AT we were more or less a validation partner even. Nowadays there are a few large factories pumping out stuff with different labels.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
The Sandforce 2200 controller was used by a bunch of different companies but to my knowledge it’s not possible to patch that bug if one owns one of the smaller brands’ drives. It’s unlikely enough to get OCZ’ utility to recognize its own drives, let alone another vendor’s.So, even if the controller is the same and even if the other hardware is standard, is there a standard utility that can be used with any drive made by any brand? Sandforce never seemed to bother to offer anything like that and there were a lot of different brands using its controllers.
Also, even when a controller is standard the firmware may not be, as in the case of Intel’s Sandforce drives as far as I know.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
So my question remains: are all the Inland drives able to be firmware-updated and secure erased?Or, are such ‘small brand’ drives locked out of those things?
rahvin - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Why would they offer a tool when they can charge the OEM to produce a branded tool for those drives only?There's little incentive for an ODM to provide anything they aren't paid for and their customers aren't the retail buyers, it's the OEM's.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Samsung's over-represented in this article mainly because they're one of the few companies still sampling new SATA drives for review, and I didn't want to have the SATA market segments represented by old 64-layer drives that you can no longer purchase.As for the Inland drives: I don't have any easy way to get samples of a large number of their drives. I strongly prefer not wasting time re-testing the same drive with a different brand's sticker. I do plan to soon have full results for E12+TLC, E12S+QLC, E16+TLC, E16+QLC drives in Bench, and I'll be getting an E18 sample soon. They won't all be from the same brand, but the results will be generally representative of the equivalents from other Phison-based brands.
I also wish the smaller SSD brands did a better job of making firmware updates available. That is definitely a valid reason for preferring some brands over others. It's a little hard to evaluate vendors on the timeliness of their firmware update releases at product launch, and I've never made it a priority to systematically compare vendors on this post-launch.
Part of why it's been a low priority has been because it seems like firmware updates are generally not as important these days. When a controller is first launched there are often a few updates to optimize performance, but those usually don't have a big impact on the overall standings of a drive. Firmware updates to fix critical bugs seem to be thankfully less common. And for users who really do care about making sure they've got the absolute latest firmware on their Phison drives, you can usually find a way to apply the update using a different vendor's tool—not ideal by any means, but it works.
bobbaniak - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
It's a bit strange that the fastest drive on the market (WD Black SN850) has not been tested :/Oxford Guy - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
I'd like an article that has all the Inland drives. All of them. Micro Center has an entire case devoted to them and they've been available on Amazon for quite some time.Why is it that, when I go to look for a review, I find just one TechPowerUp review of just one drive in just one size?
It's really a silly situation, particularly considering that, unless I've missed something, the brand has never offered a firmware update + secure erase tool for its drives.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
It has, and the results are in Bench. I'll be writing up a full review for the SN850 soon, but for this article I wanted to use drives that had also been through the old test suite so I could know what to expect when debugging the new test suite.PKShadow - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
Great article! I would love to see a few more older drives added for reference (maybe a 970 Pro, WD Black, 970 Evo Plus), plus several of the other PCIe 4 drives now on the market - Sabrent Rocket/Plus/Q4, Corsair MP600/Pro/Core, Seagate Firecuda and Gigabyte Aorus. Thanks!Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 2, 2021 - link
The back catalog of drives will all be tested eventually. I'm currently prioritizing drives based on what comparison data I'll need for the next several reviews.Seagate FireCuda 510 and 520 are already in Bench with partial results. Sabrent Rocket Q4 is currently on the testbed, and the 8TB Rocket Q will get its turn at some point (it takes a long time to test large QLC drives). The Corsair MP600 CORE is in line, and the MP600 PRO will be when it arrives. I try not to spend all my time re-testing the same Phison hardware from different brands, so you won't be able to get results for all of the drives from all of your favorite brands. That makes for painfully boring reviews, and most brands aren't interested in sampling drives just to contribute to Bench without a full review.
PKShadow - Wednesday, February 3, 2021 - link
Awesome - thanks for all your hard work! Definitely helps!jabber - Wednesday, February 3, 2021 - link
Be nice to see a roundup of all those ultra cheap SSD brands you see on Amazon all the time. I've bought one or two for test/pre builds and such and to be honest a few years later they are all still trucking.wr3zzz - Wednesday, February 3, 2021 - link
PCIe4 SSD is nearly 2x the price of PCIe3 where I am. I am willing to pay for performance if it's worth it but I really can't tell from this article.Also, I read that the upcoming DirectStorage will require PCIe4 but I have yet found anything to explain why. If that were the case then it's really no debate on what to get for a new build.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 4, 2021 - link
I really doubt DirectStorage will require PCIe 4 SSDs. There will probably be at least a subset of DirectStorage functionality that doesn't even require NVMe.racerx_is_alive - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
While it likely won't require PCIe 4 SSDs I'm assuming DirectStorage will finally be the thing that makes PCIe 4 SSDs worth the extra cost. I keep going back and forth on buying a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro or if I should pocket the difference and get a WD Black 750. Obviously the 980 is a better drive (just looking at the bench!) but I am hoping that the additional queues in the PCIe 4 SSDs will really show their value later with DirectStorage.edzieba - Friday, February 5, 2021 - link
I'd love to see the PCIe 4.0 drives tested at PCIe 3.0 speeds, to see how much of the performance advantage is really down to link rate vs. just newer controllers and NAND.Agent Smith - Friday, February 5, 2021 - link
Where is the Sabrent Rocket 4 PLUS ?Oxford Guy - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link
Inland Performance Plus drive does not fit in a Gigabyte Z390 UD, even though it’s an ATX board.Gigabyte managed to screw that up. The screw is too close to the expansion slot. It also conflicts with my EK CPU watercooling bracket.
Stealth ways to punish people for saving a bit of money?
Shows the importance of having actual reviews rather than specs run-through.
Oxford Guy - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link
It also shows what happens when there is a Wild West lack of standardization.It’s utterly ridiculous to buy a part and have it be impossible to install.
Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link
Inland Performance Plus is this the M.2 NVMe with a built-in heatsink? M.2 is a well-established standard with exact dimensions for everything including the screw hole. However, the standard does not include any heatsink and thus any M.2 you find with a heatsink on is a gamble in terms of compatibility.Reviews don't really help with that because it's impossible to test comptiability in +100 motherboards in all sorts of configurations.
RobJoy - Thursday, February 11, 2021 - link
What about newest PCIe 4.0 drives?XacTactX - Thursday, February 11, 2021 - link
Mr. Tallis, I'd appreciate some advice from you about the spare area of an SSD and how it impacts performance. I have a question about the numbers in this picture:https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16458/hea...
I understand that an SSD has high performance when it is empty, and the performance drops off when it is full. I have two questions:
1. How much spare area do you leave on the SSDs for the full "Heavy" benchmark?
2. As a rule of thumb, how much spare area do you think needs to be left on an SSD so the performance will stay closer to the empty numbers and it will not degrade significantly, like in the full numbers
Thank you for your time.
Scour - Monday, February 15, 2021 - link
The most important thing for me is writing big amount of data which exceeds the Pseudo-SLC-Cache. And the speed if the SSD is almost full.Reviews of the speed of the Pseudo-SLC-Cache can be found often.
And I hope an Intel system with PCIe 4.0 will also be available soon in your tests :)
TechW - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Perhaps I missed it if it is being done. I'd like to see benchmarks on drives that support hardware encryption with the encryption enabled. Several new ones coming out at the end of this month now will support hardware encryption. That would be a good time to do testing with encryption enabled.saurabsfdc - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
how is 2 years old Kingston a2000 compared to Samsung 980.i guess except sequential read write which is higher in Samsung 980 , random read write might be lower than Kingston . Also Kingston consumes less power than Samsung 980 as per data sheet.