The Crucial MX300 750GB SSD Review: Micron's 3D NAND Arrives
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTATTO
ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.
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The ATTO performance plot shows that small reads are slow but performance is reasonably stable for large transfers, albeit a little slower than the MX200.
AS-SSD
AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.
AS-SSD shows the MX300 read speed as suffering slightly, but the (SLC cached) write speed as perfectly normal.
Idle Power Consumption
Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.
We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.
Marvell's latest controller allows for great slumber power savings, but Micron needs to work on improving active idle power draw.
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hechacker1 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Is the driver not included with Windows 10 yet?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Windows 8.1 includes basic NVMe support and will boot from a NVMe drive with no trouble. Windows 10 added support for some of the more obscure features like the administrative commands necessary for secure erase. But the driver loading that has the most potential to affect boot performance is the UEFI NVMe driver, which some motherboards might not load until after probing for the existence of any NVMe devices that they would need to inspect for the presence of a bootloader.Impulses - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Don't see how that's possible unless your needs are pretty basic and sufficiently sated by a single drive, maybe two, in which case you probably don't need the performance of a PCI-E drive...Running a smaller 256GB SM951 here and two SATA 1TB 850 EVO, the only thing I see changing in that equation is going to 512GB for the OS apps drive and to multiple 2TB drives on the SATA side.
Whether PCI-E drives should cost more than SATA ones or not isn't the issue, they're gonna keep carrying a premium as long as they're only really useful to a small niche... The only thing that will potentially lower prices quickly is their common use on laptops, but they can also opt for lower end SATA M.2 drives.
Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
The main things most of the users notices changing and HDD for an SSD is the orders of magnitude lower latency/access time and 4k/4k random performance.That's why unless you have an specific need for faster transfer rates people wont notices differences between pcie/sata ssd,
smilingcrow - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
“The lack of significant competition in the PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives bringing down prices quickly is disconcerting.Buying into SATAIII SSDs at this point in time simply is a bad idea comparatively.”
But on the other hand buying into PCIe drives at this point when the pricing is so high when for many users the benefits over SATA drives is minimal for general usage makes them a bad idea relatively.
azazel1024 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Or, you know, for all of the folks who don't have a chipset or board that supports m.2, let alone m.2 PCI-e drives currently. I am still rolling an Ivy Bridge. No m.2 anywhere in my system, and frankly the extra cost to go with an M.2 to PCI-e bridge card, to then pay a premium on an m.2 PCI-e based drive to then drop in...and not confident my board can actually boot from PCI-e storage...Yeah, SATA for me. Frankly drives are cheap enough it isn't that big a deal if I end up dropping $70-80 on an MLC 240GB drive that I use for a couple of years before shuffling it off in to my server as it's boot drive and get an m.2 PCI-e ~480GB drive or similar when finally upgrading my computer to Kaby/Castle.
One benchmark that I wish Anand would do that I have seen a few other sites do are some of the PRACTICAL benchmarks. Such as application load times, or other disk intensive operations to compare between drives, especially between "empty" and "full" states.
Do many users care if Photoshop launches in 5.2s versus 6s of a slower drive? Possibly not, but there probably are some who do. What about reloading 50 web browser tabs? Or loading 100 RAW images from disk in photoshop? A handful of real world tests would be nice to provide some more perspective too. The few sights that do, do that kind of stuff, MLC drives generally seem to have a pretty commanding lead over MLC. Again, many users might not care about shaving a second or two off an application launch time, but some do.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I went with an M.2 boot drive after seeing the difference it makes in some demanding Adobe tasks on HardOCP's reviews (of the 750 IIRC), but I chose an SM951 with confidence based largely on AT's exhaustive reviews... So yeah I'd agree, some practical tests beyond the patented AT torture tests would be nice, specially at this juncture where some people are still asking whether PCI-E/M.2 is for them... At the end of the day tho, the old cliche probably serves most well, if you even gotta ask then you're probably fine with a SATA drive.Billy Tallis - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Our AnandTech Storage Bench Light, Heavy and Destroyer tests are the tests you're looking for. They're composed entirely of real-world I/O from things like Photoshop, web browsing, gaming, virus scanning, software development and virtual machine use. It wouldn't be useful for us to report dozens of subscores breaking out each individual application: that's an overwhelming amount of data to present and contextualize, short tests of individual applications are harder to make repeatable and valid with high enough resolution, and if you have a single specific use that is most important to you, our synthetic benchmarks probably cover that. Instead we present and analyze three different real-world mixes of I/O.Impulses - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
It's just hard to translate the results from the Storage Bench to real world impact Billy... Sometimes people just like knowing "oh, it'll actually cut that workload in half". Some may be able to extrapolate that from the AT Bench but it's not immediately obvious. I don't think anyone's asking for a breakdown of every single app involved in the traces, maybe one or two of the most stressful tho? Just a thought.Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
They're not.Unless you move tons of data per day with more than 1 pci-e nvme drive there's no difference between sata and pcie ssd's. PCie ssd uses more power and produces more heat.