The Toshiba OCZ RD400 (256GB, 512GB, 1TB) M.2 PCIe SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on May 25, 2016 8:02 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 Heavy test, overall performance on the Light test shows the RD400 being slower than the Samsung PCIe 3 drives but faster than the Intel 750. In this case, the RD400 is much closer to the Samsung drives when fresh, but about halfway between Samsung and Intel for filled-drive performance.
Average service times again show that the differences between PCIe 3 drives are small compared to the gulf between them and SATA drives.
Latency outliers above 10ms are clearly more common with the RD400 than the other PCIe 3 drives, but still less than half as frequent as on any SATA drive. This time it's the 512GB and 1TB models showing a relatively large impact from the test being run on a full drive.
The RD400's energy usage is again worst overall with a significant gap between the Samsung 950 Pro and the RD400, and the 950 Pro already used more energy than most SATA drives.
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Meteor2 - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
So are we saying NVMe is only really useful for enterprise applications? There just aren't consumer use cases where drive speed is now the limiting performance factor?stux - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
This might be the case in Windows, but I've found with OSX, one of the biggest upgrades has been sata3 to PCIe ssd gen 1 to 2 and then 3Ien 0.5 to 1 to 2GB/s
This was evident with all the recent MacBook Pro 15" upgrades and also with PCIe ssds in some Mac Pro towers.
SunnyNW - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
Is the flash controller made on the same memory process or is it made on a separate logic process? I think its made on a separate (logic) process and if so would that be 28nm for most controllers? And is the manufacturing out sourced to TSMC or in-house for most?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
Controllers are made on a separate logic process.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
The PCIe NVMe controllers are mostly 28nm from what I've heard. SATA controllers can be anything from 40nm to +55nm. Like nearly all logic manufacturing, it's outsourced to TSMC and the like.BangkokTech - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
Recently got the SM950 pro 512. Large writes slow down after 30 seconds. It starts out ETA 3 minutes, 10 minutes later it's only 70% complete. I read into it; evidently these M.2 cards heat up and slow down. There is absolutely no heatsink on the card. Running them on a PCI expansion card would allow headspace for small heatsinks.BangkokTech - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
Are any of you aware of a ribbon cable/riser cable I could use to get this M.2 card off my motherboard and move it to a cooler part of my case? I'm out of PCI slots for these expansion cards.Billy Tallis - Saturday, May 28, 2016 - link
Even with the degree of thermal throttling I've observed when not using any kind of heatsink, the 512GB Samsung 950 Pro should only take ~12-13 minutes to fill to capacity with sequential writes. I suspect that your bottleneck is whatever is the source of the data being written, not the 950 Pro.BiTesterEmailer - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Informative and detailed as always.