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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CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
So you sold someone something without researching the hardware in it yourself? Kinda shady but likely he still enjoyed it.rocky12345 - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Shady? It was a pre built with 3 year warranty the finer detailed spec's were not revealed as in brands like SSD or system memory. He also wanted a gaming system but did not want to pay a lot of money. I would normally build the system myself as a custom so you know what every part is inside and you get to choose the build quality but since he wanted a gaming system on the cheap he got a pre built system. He is happy with it and it actually is a nice system for the money and he got a 3 year warranty from the OEM. So nothing shady going on here...lolwatzupken - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I am not sure if the price of such DRAM less SSDs is worth buying over a normal budget SSD. In every instance, it is performing very poorly against a budget SSD with DRAM.Lolimaster - Sunday, May 14, 2017 - link
If you're not an OEM than will sells tons of system to uninformed customers, get a good TLC or MLC if possible.jabber - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Bring back the good old BX100!nervegrind3r - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
inZGamer - Saturday, May 13, 2017 - link
As much as people complain about the low performance....when benchmarking the drive, why compare it against high end consumer SSD's? Compare it against HHD's and SSHDs's where it would actually make sense. This style of drive is not intended to compete against an EVO 850, maybe an MX300 but that would even be pushing it. It will be interesting to see where this is kind of budget SSD ends up on the $/GB scale when it actual reaches production.Lolimaster - Sunday, May 14, 2017 - link
People are actually getting scammed with the prebuild OEM systems with SSD because THAT's when they will include shi*tty dram-less SSD's (in bulk $5-10 off of each system to sell them at the same price is a lot for OEM's).Similar to TLC SSD's, dram-less SSD's consistency goes to sh*t when you empty the SLC cache, if you don't implement it, even worse, you basically get writes slower than a 5400rpm HDD with the system pegging.
I would only touch 850 EVO's, Crucial MX300 for TLC, Kingston HyperX Savage or 850 pro for MLC.
genzai - Tuesday, May 16, 2017 - link
Seems like one good use for Optane would be to replace the DRAM (over a DDR interface) on drives like these.