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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Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
There are numerous 8-lane enterprise SSDs already.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
e.g. HGST FlashMAX III and HGST Ultrastar SN260 products are eight-lane devices.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Hey look, another SSD that has no reason whatsoever to exist!I don't understand why manufacturers don't, y'know, try to COMPETE with Samsung instead of re-re-releasing the same old, tired, slow controllers with slightly different but ultimately insignificant spins on them.
DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller. That means almost all of the other companies selling drives have to pick and choose between a handful of controllers made by Phison/etc. Until they recover from Samsung's blind siding them and design new higher performing architectures from the ground up none of them have anything in the same performance class. If what happened at the start of the market when Intel's controllers were unbeatable is any indication we should hopefully have competitive designs available in another year or so.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
-- Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller.well, isn't a controller an implementation of physics and math? which is to say, unless something new happens with NAND chips (not just node size or xLC), may haps we've reached the one-true-answer to the controller problem? may be there's just no more there, there.
Samus - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Wow. That was disappointing.RaistlinZ - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Current Newegg Prices:1. 500GB Samsung 960 Pro = $299.99
2. 1TB Samsung 960 Pro = 600.82
The NX500 has no reason to exist. The price needs to be cut in half to make it even REMOTELY attractive.
alpha754293 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I'm surprised you didn't bother comparing it against the Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe NVMe SSD.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I had originally planned to include the 400GB 750, but some of the results from it looked funny and I decided it wasn't worth postponing the review for several days to re-test the 750. That drive's a pain to test, because I have to run each test twice in order to record the power on both the 3.3V and 12V lines, and the performance has to match between the two runs for the results to be valid.alpha754293 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Depending on how you want to tackle/handle it.There are statistical methods available out there that even with noisy data (e.g. high standard deviations) that you can still use it to process data that might otherwise not make sense at first glance, on the surface.
Course, that would also mean that care would need to be taking so that the tests in and of itself are repeatable.
I only mention it because I would be VERY interested to see how this compared to the Intel 750 series.
Thanks.