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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damianrobertjones - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Opens Amazon/ebay and types 'Toshiba XG5'. Nothing found. Oh well you've lost a possible sale Toshiba! Well done. (U.K.)mapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Get a 960 Pro instead, far better buy. My 512GB was only 249 UKP new.Or if you want to save some pennies, look for an SM951, SM961 or the older 950 Pro.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The XG5 is an OEM drive. They're selling every single one they can manufacture to companies like Dell. We'll see a retail counterpart eventually, once their BiCS3 manufacturing volume ramps up.wazoo42 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
What happened to the performance consistency tests? Those were one of the primary reasons I went to Anand for SSD reviews.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
They'll be back eventually. I'm currently keeping the testbed busy around the clock with all the new drives that have arrived recently, plus re-testing older drives on the new 2017 test suite. The steady-state performance consistency test was the least realistic benchmark on the old 2015 test suite, so its replacement in the 2017 suite is my lowest priority. Once the testbed has some idle time, I'll go back and run the steady-state performance consistency tests on everything.In the meantime, the ATSB tests do have consistency scores in the form of 99th percentile latency, including broken down by reads and writes. I'm also considering adding some form of consistency score to the synthetic benchmarks that are already in this review.