Choosing the Right SSD for a Skylake-U System
by Ganesh T S on May 9, 2016 8:00 AM ESTSYSmark 2014 Benchmarks
BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 is an objective performance benchmark for PCs. It is based on running real computer applications that one might use in day-to-day business / office activities. It is important to note that it does not intend to artificially drive components to peak capacity. Real user workloads and datasets are processed to determine how the user experience is impacted by the performance of the system.
SYSmark 2014 has three usage scenarios
- Office Productivity
- Media Creation
- Data/Financial Analysis.
The Office Productivity scenario models productivity usage including word processing, spreadsheet data manipulation, email creation/management and web browsing. The Media Creation scenario models using digital photos and digital video to create, preview, and render advertisements for a fictional businesses. The Data/Financial Analysis scenario creates, compresses, and decompresses data to review, evaluate and forecast business expenses. Also, the performance and viability of financial investments is analyzed using past and projected performance data.
The raw scores are meant to be compared against the 1000 scored by a Haswell Core i3-based desktop sporting a 500GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. A score of 2000 would meant that the PC under test would appear to be twice as responsive as the calibration system.
SYSmark 2014's whitepaper (PDF) includes sensitivity analysis - how the scores vary with the amount of RAM, processor choice, GPU, storage drive, OS and display resolution. The whitepaper's sensitivity analysis for the storage subsystem involves comparison of a hard-drive based system and a SATA SSD. One can get as much as 20% improvement in scores (depending on the workload) by upgrading from a HDD to a SSD.
Since our evaluation also keeps all the system hardware and software the same, except for the storage drive, it also fits SYSmark 2014's sensitivity analysis model. What is the improvement when one goes from a SATA SSD to a PCIe SSD, or, from a PCIe AHCI SSD to a PCIe NVMe SSD, or, from a PCIe 2.0 x4 SSD to a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD? The graphs in this section bring out the SYSmark 2014 scores in these scenarios.
A note about the colors used in the graphs is in order. Since we are dealing with a number of degrees of freedom - BIOS version differences corresponding to OPI GT2 and OPI GT4 rates, as well the characteristics of the SSDs themselves - PCIe vs. SATA and AHCI vs. NVMe, we chose to go with a lighter color shade for the older BIOS / OPI GT2 link and separate colors for the different SSDs.
The important takeaway here is that day-to-day PC activities have little to gain by moving from AHCI to NVMe or from PCIe 2.0 x4 to PCIe 3.0 x4. There is a bit of discernible benefit in moving from SATA to PCIe, though. Surprisingly, the OPI GT4 rates improve the scores quite a bit for the Mushkin Atlas Vital SATA SSD. This means that even budget Skylake NUC users using traditional SATA SSDs have something to gain by moving to the BIOS with OPI GT4 rates when it becomes public.
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AnnonymousCoward - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
When will AnandTech realize that synthetic hard drive benchmarks are utterly pointless?http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro...
It's not like you'd round up several graphics cards that produce the same fps, and only run synthetic tests on them to try to show which is fastest. That would be foolish. And that's what's being done with SSDs.
You go as far to claim "those involving heavy multimedia editing and frequent transfers of large-sized files, the PCIe SSDs can definitely provide tangible benefits." How do you know?? If you look at the actual data (in the techreport site), load times of 500-800MB files were pretty much a wash across all the drives. You're misleading readers by only showing PCMark8 and claiming there are tangible benefits.
ganeshts - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
Dude, did you even read the full article - particularly, the place where the graphs for the 'AnandTech DAS Suite' are displayed? Those graphs are the places where tangible benefit is shown for the PCIe SSDs.In fact, the only place where I have put in 'synthetic hard drive benchmarks' was the CrystalDiskMark comparisons when introducing the four SSDs. Again, that was prefaced with this text: "...it is useful to determine whether the SSDs are operating as per the manufacturer's claimed specifications. It can also help in finding out whether the SSD is connected via the most optimal interface. ..."
In fact, we set out with this article with the sole intention to use ONLY real-world, application-based benchmarks. Please read the article at least once before putting forward an accusation in its comments section.
AnnonymousCoward - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
It really is a great article, it's well-written, and an interesting read. I'm only focusing on the lack of _real_ real-world benchmarks.You consider SYSmark, PCMark, and DAS to be real-world, but the problem is they aren't. First, I highly question the accuracy: in an actual load time situation, I seriuosly doubt the 950 Pro will be 5x faster than the Mushkin, as PCMark and DAS show. Secondly, these benchmark programs don't give a tangible understanding: seeing a load time difference in "seconds" is tangible, but seeing scores of a thousand is not.
It's really easy to prove this to yourself: use a stopwatch on anything with a load time. If the times are less than 3x of each other (more likely, within 10%) then it will be evident that PCMark and DAS are lying.
ganeshts - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link
SYSmark is real-world. Look at their whitepaper if you haven't had a chance to try it out. It actually runs the applications and keeps track of how much time it takes to complete tasks - and it actually shows there is little to no difference between a PCIe AHCI SSD operating at 2.0 x4 and a NVMe SSD operating at 3.0 x4.PCMark - I have linked the PDFs which show how much time it took to complete each workload (real-world trace). The SATA SSD takes around 2 seconds more than the NVMe SSD - and between AHCI and NVMe, it is 0.2 - 0.3s.
The DAS stuff is pretty much as real world as it can be. You have 250GB of data to transfer from one partition to another. The SATA SSD takes 4x the time of the PCIe NVMe SSD. The instantaneous bandwidth numbers are presented in the graph for you to see. Are you saying I am misrepresenting facts?
SYSmark and PCMark are _real_real-world benchmarks - as real-world as you can get if you want highly repeatable benches with reproducible scoring , not something a tech site cooks up on its own (like our DAS suite - which has its own reasons for existence - since we developed it, we can instrument it in ways not possible with third-party benchmarks).
Where does PCMark and DAS say they are representing load time situations? Did you take a look at the PDFs? The PDFs show how much difference is there for the real workload of manipulating images with Photoshop etc. The bandwidth numbers generated by PCMark - I clearly state it is artificial and assumes workload that is not CPU-bound. You should look at the Storage Score to get an idea of how much faster SSD X would be over SSD Y. The bandwidth numbers are only to indicate how the SSDs would perform in a storage-bound situation - Read the explanation preceding the graph.
The DAS suite doesn't talk about load time at all - it notes time taken to transfer a large amount of data from one partition to another. You can see your tangible 'seconds' in those graphs.
Stopwatch and stuff - at the risk of sounding like a broken watch - check the PDFs of the PCMark 8 storage bench results.
rossjudson - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link
I'm not sure why FIO isn't used for your benchmarking. Doesn't have the pretty graphs, but it's got scalability and rigor. You're not going to use Crystal to find out how well a PCIe SSD performs at 600K IOPS, or what happens when you're writing maximum sequential load to 4 of them in a single system."What can this hardware do?" and "How will this affect my workload?" are different questions, for sure. I think your application-level benchmarks are quite useful for answering the second. But perhaps not so much for the first.
Or maybe Crystal Diskmark is super-awesome, and FIO's not needed any more. ;)
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link
Your points look technically sound and you clearly have a far better understanding of those benchmark suites than me. The thing is, though, this is confusing. It's not obvious how to take 4 benchmark program results and know how actual computer usage precisely compares.AT got it right here: http://www.anandtech.com/print/1371/ Load times are easy to comprehend and apply to what we care about! And shockingly, RAID-0 won every suite but marginally lost in the simple use-case test.
I can tell you a lot of people have a misconception that RAID-0 SSDs or the 950 Pro load things >3% faster. [reference to the data: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pr...] The misconception is propagated by reviews that show a bunch of graphs with big performance differences and an omission of simple use-cases. I guess users buying a NUC care about boot time, app load time, etc. Why not show the difference. That would certainly be more meaningful than any *Mark suite.
Agent Smith - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
Not so quick to apologise eah?Experientia docet
Kvaern2 - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
Much can be read in a username.MrSpadge - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
"Please read the article at least once before putting forward an accusation in its comments section."Non, no! That's not how the internets are supposed to work ;)
MrSpadge - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
(Oops, meant to reply to Ganesh's post)