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 - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
As expected, the MK8115 drives perform relatively poorly overall on The Destroyer. The TLC drive's average data rate is about 20% slower than the next slowest drive in this comparison. The MLC sample actually manages to slightly outperform the earlier JMicron drives, which weren't even handicapped by a lack of external DRAM. However, relative to current MLC drives, the MK8115 MLC drive is about 25% slower overall on this test.
The average service times of the MK8115 drives aren't particularly bad. The TLC drive's average service time is lower than either of the other two SATA drives using the same Micron 3D TLC. The MK8115 sample with MLC is slower than the Samsung 850 PRO and PNY CS2211, but slightly faster than the JMicron drives and the OCZ VX500.
The MK8115 drives do a decent job of keeping latency under control, with the MLC drive in particular having about the same number of outliers above 10ms as the best SATA SSDs. The MK8115 with TLC has some trouble but still has far fewer outliers above 10ms than the ADATA SU800.
However, when looking at the number of extreme latency outliers above 100ms, the MK8115 drives are the worst in the bunch and even the MLC drive scores worse than all the competing TLC solutions.
The power efficiency of the MK8115 drives is decent. Even though these drives take a bit longer to complete the test, the total energy used over the course of the test isn't any higher than most of the competition.
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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.