Previewing Maxiotek's MK8115 SSD Controller: Can DRAM-less Drives Make The Cut?
by Billy Tallis on May 9, 2017 8:00 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.
The Light test shows a narrower spread of scores than the other ATSB tests, but the MK8115 drives are in last place with average data rates slightly below their respective OCZ competition, and they trail by a slightly wider margin when the test is run on a full drive. The fastest MLC and TLC SATA SSDs (from Samsung) are 20-25% faster.
Average service times from the MK8115 samples are on par with other SATA SSDs when the test is run on an empty drive, but when the drive is full service times more than double and are substantially higher than any other SSDs.
The number of high-latency outliers above 10ms experienced by the MK8115 drives when the Light test is run on an empty drive is typical for other SATA SSDs. When the drives are filled before the test, the MK8115 with MLC is affected significantly but not as much as drives like the Crucial MX300 or OCZ VX500. The MK8115 with TLC does far worse and ends up almost three times as many outliers as the next worst-scoring drive (the ADATA SU800).
Power consumption for the two MK8115 drives on the Light test is very similar and slightly better than average. The SATA SSDs that consume substantially more power are Samsung's high performers and the two drives using the Phison S10 controller.
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jabber - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Its like Video Recorders or DVD players. The first ones weighed 30 kilos and were built like they were made during the Industrial Revolution. By the time they stopped making them they weighed 3 kilos, had 70% fewer parts and were mostly plastic.Magichands8 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Yep! Prices are getting higher in many cases even if they aren't dropping AND performance is either mediocre or just getting worse. Like I've said before, somewhere there are people buying such products. I don't know who they are or what's wrong withe them but I guess manufacturers are going to continue the trend for as long these people have money to lose. Even though it's dismaying to see I won't have much trouble waiting them out though. There's just very little value in most current offerings.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I'm not sure of an instance where performance has dropped in the same price band over the past couple of years. Please feel free to enlighten meBrokenCrayons - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I'm one of those people buying such things. In my case, I was using mechanical hard disks until the middle of last year and I'm slowly (due to unusually high NAND prices) purchasing low performance SSDs for my home computers. Cheap, relatively slow SSDs still let me enjoy faster and more responsive storage. Since I'm not a power user or someone that's interested in waving around my consumer electronics like they're an extension of my reproductive organs, I have no want or need for the fastest and most expensive tier of solid state storage.While you wonder what's wrong with us for our purchases, we wonder what's wrong with you for being worried about what we buy when you can simply mind your business and buy a higher end product meant to meet your needs or desires.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I definitely respect your choices, as even a low-end SSD can best a HDD for metrics a typical home user would care about.melgross - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Right now, there are memory shortages. NAND shortages are expected to last until the end of the year. Then prices will begin dropping again.beginner99 - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Yeah if this continues it will take less than a year and they will actually manage to perform worse than HDDs.JimmiG - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
I agree, unless you absolutely need more SSD storage right now, I'd recommend holding off until next year.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I just hope the shortage is going to end, and we can go back to cheaper SSDs. I'm also unsure of the usefulness of this drive, but I can see it being used in systems a notch above budget systems.looncraz - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I just want a 2TB SSD that costs $200 US and performs better than a hard drive (no spin up delays, lower latency, no moving parts).I could deal with 150MB/s transfer rates and even 2ms latencies for that. Still worlds better than the hard drives I use for storage now considering I have to spin them down as they are only accessed every few hours a couple times a day (but then stream data at 40MB/s+ for a couple hours).
I would buy three without hesitation.