Previewing Maxiotek's MK8115 SSD Controller: Can DRAM-less Drives Make The Cut?

AnandTech 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.