The Corsair Neutron NX500 (400GB) PCIe SSD Review: Big Card, Big Pricetag
by Billy Tallis on August 16, 2017 10:00 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. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Corsair Neutron NX500 delivers a better average data rate on the Heavy test than the other Phison drives, especially when the test is run on a full drive, a case that the Patriot Hellfire handles particularly badly. The other MLC-based NVMe SSDs all perform better than the NX500.
The average latency provided by the NX500 on the Heavy test is only modestly slower than the competing drives using the same NAND but different controllers. Against the other Phison drives that differ primarily in firmware, the NX500 is the fastest. When considering 99th percentile latencies the Patriot Hellfire slightly outperforms the NX500 when the test is run on an empty drive, and the overall spread of scores between the Phison drives and the fastest drives in this bunch is a bit smaller.
The average read latency of the NX500 on the Heavy test is pretty good: only about 20-30µs slower than the fastest 15nm MLC drive, and Samsung's 950 PRO is only a little bit faster than that. The average write latency of the NX500 and the other Phison E7 drives is more than twice as high than the best 3D NAND SSDs, and substantially worse than the other 15nm MLC drives.
As with the average latencies, the 99th percentile read latency of the NX500 is pretty good while on the write side it's slower than average, but not horrible. The Zotac SONIX is the slowest of the three Phison drives, but also the one with the least performance drop when the Heavy test is run on a full drive.
The NX500 on the Heavy test again comes in last place for power efficiency, with the Zotac SONIX only slightly beating it. The Patriot Hellfire's power consumption score is good by the standards of planar NAND PCIe SSDs.
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Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The ATSB Heavy and Light tests include data from runs on a full drive, and The Destroyer writes more than enough data to put this drive into steady-state. Synthetic benchmarks of steady-state performance would not be more representative of real-world usage. Client drives do not get hammered with constant writes. I will eventually add some steady-state tests back into the test suite, but they will not be and never have been the most important aspect of a client drive review. They're useful to study how the drive handles garbage collection under pressure, but the impact that has on real-world performance is minimal.qlum - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
The only place I wouldn't go for samsung is when you want to use a cheap 120gb ssd. At that point the cheapest samsung drives are just too expensive.Vorl - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
did I miss something big, besides the card? This while a good review, is a very uninteresting product that just wastes space compared to a 4x m.2 slot.DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
You can put a card form factor drive in an older board without m.2 slots. Unfortunately the underlying Phision controller isn't much faster than older SATA models; making it another underwhelming product.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Even then you can buy a cheap PCI-E x4 to m.2 adapter for like $15. There's no reason for this card to exist at these capacities. If it was 2 or 4TB, maybe, but not 400/800GBmapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Yup, I have a 960 Pro 512GB on an Akasa card on an X79 board, does about 3.5GB/sec in CDM.Pity the review didn't mention the cheaper SM951/SM961, and they really need to get a 960 Pro to round out the data, the one I bought wasn't that much more than the EVO and it's a far better product. I don't like the 960 EVO, it's slower than the 950 Pro most of the time.
r3loaded - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
> Skip to the graphs.> Another SSD that gets pwned by a 960 Evo, nevermind the Pro.
> Write this comment, ignore the rest of the review and close the tab.
creed3020 - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
+1Unfortunately so, wish it wasn't......very disappointing Corsair.
timchen - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
If I am not mistaken, 960 EVO 1 TB can perform quite differently to 500GB... so using the 1TB performance per dollar does not seem very fair to the 400 GB...Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I do wish I had a sample of the 500GB 960 EVO, because performance does generally scale with capacity. But it's pretty safe to assume that at low queue depths and while the SLC cache isn't full, the 500GB 960 EVO will perform similarly enough to the 1TB that it still beats the Phison E7 drives.