The Intel SSD 545s (512GB) Review: 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND Hits Retail
by Billy Tallis on June 27, 2017 6:00 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.
The Intel 545s delivers a much faster average data rate on the Light test than the 540s, and is even slightly faster than the Crucial MX300. It isn't quite up to the level of the Samsung drives, but it's reasonably close. The ADATA SU800 takes first place here, showing that it is optimized for high peak performance at the expense of very poor performance under sustained heavy workloads.
The average latency of the Intel 545s on the Light test is nothing special, but that's still an improvement over the 540s, or the MX300 when the test is run on a full drive.
All of the TLC SSDs suffer from significantly higher read latency when the Light test is run on a full drive rather than an empty drive. The MLC-based Samsung 850 PRO is only slightly affected, and the Intel 545s is less severely affected than the Crucial MX300 or the Intel 540s. The empty-drive write latency of the 545s is significantly better than the 540s but still slightly behind the other 3D NAND SSDs. When the test is run on a full drive, the write latency of the Crucial MX300 spikes and the 545s ends up tied with the SU800 and trailing only the Samsung drives.
The Light test is easy enough that the Crucial MX300 has the best power consumption whether the test is run on a full drive or an empty drive. The Intel 540s and 545s are essentially tied for second place, with the Samsung 850 EVO right behind. The Samsung 850 PRO is the only true outlier here: it generally sacrifices some power efficiency to deliver the best performance, but the Light test doesn't stress it enough for that to matter.
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t.s - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
But of course, "If you want to play it safe", you could always go for the intel 545s /sDanNeely - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
What happened to the performance consistency testing?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
It's coming. But we had a rather short period of time to work on this."This launch comes at a bit of an awkward time for us. I've retired our aging 2015 SSD testbed and moved all the custom and homemade power measurement equipment over to a new system. Windows 8.1 is out and Windows 10 is in, and our IOmeter synthetic benchmarks are being replaced with Linux-based FIO tests that are more suited to modern TLC SSDs with SLC caches. For the past few weeks I've been focusing my efforts on validating the new testbed and test suite against NVMe SSDs, so the arrival at short notice of a new SATA SSD left me with no relevant comparison data."
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
I didn't have time. I'll be doing it later this week. The new 2017 performance consistency test will be more thorough about testing different overprovisioning amounts, but that also makes it take longer to run.jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
The only interesting part is the rushed launch.Is anything much better about to hit the market or is Intel just trying to ship some more NAND in Q2 to "fix" the results? I suppose the Crucial BX300 is due in a couple of weeks, anything else?
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Intel wanted to beat WD and Toshiba to market with 64-layer 3D NAND. The Toshiba XG5 is already in the hands of OEMs but I'm not aware of any systems shipping with it yet. WD's 3D NAND SSDs are set to ship in Q3. They're all likely to have more powerful controllers than SM2259, and their charge trap flash cell architecture is closer to Samsung's V-NAND than IMFT 3D floating gate. Intel's right to want to be ahead of the others, but I think they could have spared another week.jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Another week is no good, July 4th compromises the entire week.I was thinking more about value than perf when it comes to beating other new prods but chances are it is also about Q2 results, they want to boost the NAND segment a bit.
Do you have the Toshiba XG5 for review?
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Yes, the XG5 is what got bumped off the testbed to make room for these SATA drives. I'll be switching the testbed back to PCIe drives in a few days, after finishing up a few more tests on this batch of SATA drives.jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Looking forward to that one.With the new tests, do you still look at mixed workloads?
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Yes. I'm not planning huge changes to the mixed workload tests, other than testing at 10% increments instead of 20%. My biggest goal with the new test suite is to have things more automated, which makes it easy to increase the level of detail in a lot of the tests (but it also makes it too easy to make the test suite take forever to run).