AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy

Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy (Data Rate)

The average data rate of the MX300 is virtually identical to that of its predecessors, except that when full the MX300's identity as a TLC drive is revealed by a precipitous drop.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy (Latency)

The average service time of the MX300 when running the test on an empty drive places the MX300 between the slow MLC drives and the fast planar TLC. When the test is run on a full drive the average service time grows to be close to that of some of the cheapest drives on the market.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy (Latency)

When run on an empty drive, the write-oriented Heavy test doesn't produce a significant number of latency outliers, but on a full drive delays are quite common.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy (Power)

The MX300's power efficiency is once again very close to the top of the charts, even for the full-drive test.

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
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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.

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