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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MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
samevladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
It will take until Q2 2018 for prices to start going down again.milli - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
You should have included other DRAM-less drives.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I would have, if I had any on hand to test. Nobody's offered one up for review in quite a while, and I've asked a few vendors for a Phison S11 drive but they're not interested.vladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
It's pretty obvious why, at least Maxiotek has some guts.bortiz - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
My problem with dram-less ssd is the durability of the drive. How does the life-expectancy of this drive compare to other SSD drives. The DRAM in current SSD drives groups data accesses together, reducing the data array access. This increases performance and array durability. Array durability is proportional to the number of array accesses. I don't think this is a good idea and I would like to see if someone can prove to me that this will have a decent life span (5 years???)vladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Whether a SSD IS DRAM-less or not doesn't influence life expectancy.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
SSDs that have external DRAM usually don't use it as a write cache for user data; it's just for caching the mapping metadata. A DRAMless controller like MK8115 can do pretty much the same amount of write combining and wear leveling that a mainstream controller can. There may be a slight increase in write amplification from the controller having to flush metadata updates to the flash more often, but mainstream drives don't want to buffer those writes too much either, for the same safety reasons they don't put user data in the DRAM.Remember that write operations are the only ones that significantly affect drive lifetime. DRAMless controllers need to do more flash reads, but read disturb errors are still too rare for that to matter to drive reliability.
CrazyElf - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
It is difficult for it to make the cut with a low 4k random read and write test like this SSD has.I think that the DRAM cache is well worth it.
I think it is best to hold off on SSDs for now.
rocky12345 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Yea no thanks if this is what DRAM-less drives are like I think I will stick to SSD's that can maintain their performance a lot better. I don't care if these drives are a bit cheaper if you end up swearing at your computer because the SSD is lagging then for peace of mind just spend the extra cash on a real SSD.I just sold a gaming system to a customer that had a SSD installed as the windows drive. Yep it booted fast and was pretty peppy but if you tried to work the system it seemed like the SSD would bog right down to a crawl so I would assume it was a DRAM-Less SSD. When I sold the customer on the system I was going off of my own SSD usage on my gaming laptop & gaming desktop options which would never bog down like that. I guess the good news was the customer did come back a few days later and said the system was great and so fast that he never had to wait for stuff to load like he did before on his older setup so he was a happy camper I guess.