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 - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The NX500's average data rate on The Destroyer is clearly faster than the other Phison E7 drives, but still far slower than competing MLC NVMe SSDs. The Plextor M8Pe and OCZ RD400 offer much higher performance from the same 15nm MLC NAND.
The NX500 offers the best average latency on The Destroyer among the Phison E7 drives. The 99th percentile latencies are quite different, with the Zotac SONIX outperforming the Corsair NX500, while the Patriot Hellfire is clearly having problems keeping latency under control.
Splitting the average latency by reads and writes doesn't reveal any surprises among the Phison drives, but there are a few differences in the rankings of the other drives. The Intel 600p stands out as the only drive that has a real problem with write latency even in the average case.
The 99th percentile latencies show interesting differences between the Phison drives in how they handle reads and writes. The Zotac SONIX has the best 99th percentile read latency among the Phison E7 drives and places pretty well among the overall field of competitors. The Corsair Neutron NX500 is substantially slower, while the Patriot Hellfire's 99th percentile read latency is worse than any other NVMe drive on this chart.
The 99th percentile write latencies are all rather slow on the Phison E7 drives, but the Corsair NX500 is the best of the three at keeping write latency low. This is to be expected given the greater spare area the NX500 has to work with, but the impact of that much extra overprovisioning on write QoS ought to be more significant.
The Corsair Neutron NX500 and Zotac SONIX are at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the M.2 drives here since the NX500 and SONIX add-in cards draw power from the 12V supply and thus include more voltage regulation circuitry than the M.2 SSDs. The NX500 is further disadvantaged by having more DRAM to power. However, even the Patriot Hellfire M.2 can't come close to the 3D NAND SSDs from Samsung and Toshiba. Surprisingly, the most efficient planar NAND SSD in this bunch is the Plextor M8PeY, which was flashing its red LEDs during the entire test.
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shabby - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
According to toms review the 500gb one still does 2gb/s read/write at qd1, nothing touches it.Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Yes, according to Tom's and others, the 500 GB 960 EVO is still the drive to have in its size class - which is why I bought one. On the other hand the 256 GB 960 EVO doesn't stand up against the competition like the 500 and up drives do. So, when comparing these drives with an eye to actually purchasing one, its a great idea to find reviews of the actual size you are looking at and comparing against other like sized drives.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Trouble with the EVO is when its cache is full it can't take the heavy writes, and its random & steady state performance are not that great. They're good enough (I bought a 250GB for my brother), but the Pro is way better, and the 950 Pro is better aswell.CrazyElf - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
This doesn't justify the premium over SATA SSDs.Unlike say, the Samsung SSD 960 series or the Intel SSD 750, which do have something to offer, especially when it comes to sequential performance, these drives really struggle to justify the premium.
Yeah it seems increasingly like Intel (SSD 750 dominates sustained writes on 4k) and Samsung (dominates most other benchmarks).
I mean, products like Optane are expensive, but at least they have some premium (ex: the good 4k performance).
versesuvius - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Corsair expects to be paid higher for whatever it puts together no matter what. The same is true with Cooler Master and Logitech. For each single one of their products there is an equivalent product on the market that is higher in quality and performance and considerably lower in price.valinor89 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I don't know about Cooler Master, but logitech sells plenty of cheap stuff and some products have very good prices for what they offer. The G502 was quite the revolution in perf/price and I find my G610 to have very good quality compared to Corsais Oferings.Bullwinkle J Moose - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
With PCIe lane counts coming up, I hope to see Samsung and Intel start using themWith a full 16 lanes being used, benchmarking can finally change along with the SSD processors/firmware
Intel may take the lead with xpoint initially, but with the ability to run several simultaneous tests on an SSD max iop / mixed mode, copy/paste, 100GB uncompressed read speed, 100GB uncompressed write as well as torture tests as the onboard processors finally catch up to the lane counts, I think Samsung may yet have a few surprises for xpoint
4 lanes ain't gonna cut it for my 16 core cpu
Get with the times!
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
No matter how many PCIe lanes your ThreadRipper CPU has available (assume that's what you are talking about since you say 16 core) the spec for NVMe is still x4Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
NVMe has nothing to say about PCIe lane counts. You're probably thinking about the M.2 connector, but that is hardly the only way to connect a PCIe SSD.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Yes, it is when NVMe is used through U.2 and M.2 that you get four-lane PCIe. When used through SATA Express, NVMe is stuck with two-lane PCIe.