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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
On the Light test, the Corsair Neutron NX500's average data rate is slightly slower than the other two Phison E7 drives, and more substantially behind the other MLC NVMe SSDs. Of the three Phison E7 drives, the NX500 fares the best when the drive is full.
The average latency rankings are almost identical to the average data rate rankings, except that the WD Black has jumped ahead of the Phison E7 drives. For 99th percentile latency, the NX500 performs better than the Zotac SONIX but is only faster than the Patriot Hellfire or WD Black when the test is run on a full drive.
The differences in average read and write latency between the Phison E7 drives are pretty much negligible, and their read latencies are pretty close to the competition. The average write latencies are clearly higher than almost all the competing NVMe SSDs.
The best NVMe SSDs provide 99th percentile read latencies that are half of what the Phison E7 drives provide, when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drive is full, the 99th percentile read latency of even the 3D TLC-based drives worsens to the level of the Phison E7 drives, leaving only a few MLC-based drives with any significant advantage. On the write side, the three Phison E7 drives perform similarly, and the top NVMe SSDs offer 99th percentile write latencies that are barely more than a tenth as long as the NX500's.
The NX500 is again in last place for energy efficiency, but the OCZ RD400A and Zotac SONIX are very close, and only the drives with 3D NAND are substantially more efficient.
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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.