Previewing Silicon Motion SM2260 NVMe Controller With 3D MLC NAND (512GB)
by Billy Tallis on February 17, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
The SM2260 sample's average data rate on the Heavy test is a little bit slower than the Patriot Hellfire when the test is conducted starting with an empty drive, but when starting on a full drive the SM2260 has a very slight lead. The empty drive performance of the SM2260 is still significantly better than any SATA SSD, but the full drive performance drops slightly below the Samsung 850 PRO.
The average service time of the SM2260 sample was slightly better than the Patriot Hellfire for both runs of the test. At best, the SM2260 is roughly on par with the Plextor M8Pe, OCZ RD400 and Intel SSD 750, and at its worst it still holds on to a lead over the best SATA SSDs.
Full or fresh, the SM2260 keeps latency well under control during the Heavy test, where the Patriot Hellfire began to struggle with a full drive.
The SM2260 sample uses less energy over the course of the test than the Patriot Hellfire or Plextor M8Pe, and especially the Intel SSD 600p. But other than that, the power efficiency is still poor and nowhere close to what Samsung delivers.
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BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
It seems like power consumption and consistency are both problems. Consistency can probably be addressed through tuning and optimization of firmware, but power consumption is probably something that can't be fine-tuned away. NVMe drives aren't as power friendly as SATA, but the inefficiencies of some recently reviewed SSDs here on Ananatech certainly seems to throw a spotlight on the problem. Between that and thermal throttling, the NVMe storage picture isn't very rosy just yet.KAlmquist - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Even with 25% overprovisioning, I see a 1 second interval at the 3350 mark where the IOP's fall to zero. Fortunately, the performance consistency of this SSD seems more in line with its competitors on the trace-based benchmarks (The Destroyer, etc.).The sequential read performance at queue depth 1 is lower than that of budget SATA SSD's like the MX300. At higher queue depths, the sequential reads are faster than anything a SATA SSD can manage, but queue depths of 1 are not uncommon in a desktop environment.
vladx - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
Now we can see why Micron cancelled its' NVMe SSD using the SM2260, it's simply not competive.Drumsticks - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
So what's a good roundup conclusion on the current state of NVMe drives? If we want to pick one up this year, where does the performance go from "bad for NVMe" to "not Samsung but still pretty good!"? Plextor?vladx - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
Indeed Plextor M8Pe seems to be the best buy option at the moment in the NVMe space.Drumsticks - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
That's what I was thinking. $220/$240 for the 500GB model right now. So much more than it used to be. Do we have any news on whether anything constraining nand supply will be alleviating any time soon?vladx - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
The supply problems most likely will be gone after Chinese companies will flood this market in 2018. But it could happen sooner than that depending on how fast will Toshiba/Western Digital will be rolling up their own 3D NAND supply.Chaser - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
"and the Plextor M8Pe is very slightly faster."AbRASiON - Sunday, February 19, 2017 - link
If this is CHEAPER than an MX300 it's an incredibly good bargain. The MX300's are really really well priced. I'd consider it if it's dead, dead cheap.The 960 Evo / Pro is a joke, sure it's fast but in real world usage, it's ridiculously expensive.
Make the 1TB version of this for $250 US or less and I'm very much in. (I doubt it will though)
StrangerGuy - Sunday, February 19, 2017 - link
I know right, Techreport tested the 960 Evo/Pro are both so close to yesteryears SATA3 SSDs in real-world load times that they are easily within the margin of error. I don't care about how NVMe is able to reach uber fast raw speeds that has zero use to me or to 99% of the people out there, but a hypothetical SSD with half the raw transfer speed of current SATA3 SSDs for 2x the capacity per dollar? That's a real bargain.