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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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.