The Toshiba OCZ RD400 (256GB, 512GB, 1TB) M.2 PCIe SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on May 25, 2016 8:02 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 lower write speed of the 256GB RD400 is clearly visible. All three models show essentially no performance scaling from 16kB to 64kB transfer size but only reach full performance for 512kB or larger transfers.
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.
The 256GB RD400 lags a bit behind the competition for read speed and all three are near the bottom of the PCIe segment for write speed.
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's PCIe link state power management support is broken, so only active idle power consumption is reported. This is realistic for most desktop scenarios, but a properly configured mobile system can potentially save power by enabling link power management for PCIe and SATA.
The 12V to 3.3V conversion done by the PCIe to M.2 adapter card bundled with the RD400 is providing some overhead to idle power, but most of this poor showing comes down to a lack of usable PCIe power management on common desktop platforms.
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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.