The Intel SSD 545s (512GB) Review: 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND Hits Retail
by Billy Tallis on June 27, 2017 6:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Intel SSD 545s shows substantial improvement over the 540s in average data rates for the Heavy test. The 545s is not quite able to compete against Samsung as was the case for The Destroyer, but it comes much closer than its predecessor.
The 545s also fares far better when the test is run on a full drive than the drives that use the previous generation 32L 3D TLC (ADATA's SU800 and Crucial's MX300). Both of those drives beat the 545s when the test is run on an empty drive, but suffer a huge performance loss when the drive is full.
The latency measurements for the Intel 545s on the Heavy test tell a similar story to the average data rates. Intel is now in the same league as the other 3D NAND SSD, though still in last place. When the test is run on a full drive, the Crucial and ADATA drives fall apart and average latency spikes to the 2–4ms range while the latency of the Intel 545s is unaffected and remains well below 1ms.
The read latency of the older Intel 540s is not too far behind the 3D NAND drives and it handles being full with no trouble, but its write latency in either case is almost twice as high as the 3D NAND drives. The biggest improvement of the Intel 545s comes from cutting that write latency. The read latency also improved enough to surpass the Crucial MX300.
The energy usage of the Intel 545s during the Heavy test has it essentially tied for second place with the Samsung 850 EVO, while the Crucial MX300 has the clear lead when the test is run on an empty drive. The MX300's advantage disappears when the test is run on a full drive and the SU800's energy usage almost doubles.
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woggs - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Once a nand factory is running on a new generation, it has to sell components. The only path out the door for nand is an SSD (for Intel). A product like this gets out quicker and starts the flow. Not a big money maker but gets the factory running in it's early stages.nevcairiel - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
I hope 64-layer TLC brings us closer to more affordable consumer "mass storage" SSDs. I would love to replace my 3TB storage spinning drive with a SSD, but I would need at least that space again - and right now thats still very expensive.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
That is definitely needed. SSD prices need to continue to decline in order to finally finish off HDD's once and for allHomeworldFound - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
That's going to be a slow process, one the mechanical storage companies are going to want to slow down even further.mkozakewich - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Why not a 6TB HDD?Mechanical drives look like they'll keep their edge on raw capacity for the foreseeable future. You're best off with a dual system.
Drumsticks - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
The SSD 540 was a disappointing product that honestly should have pretty much never been released. It sucked. This one is much better! It's not the best, but it's certainly competitive, and that performance on the destroyer looks great. Kudos to Intel.We just need the price to go down. I bought a 512GB Crucial MX100 years ago for $163 on sale. It's crazy how high prices have gotten recently.
mkozakewich - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Ha, I remember just a few years ago when the prices were hovering around $1/GB! It kind of feels weird to hear people complaining about high prices at 30-40¢/GB.Remember the Intel X25-M in 2009 for over $500? For 60 GB? AnandTech covered that by benchmarking application start times compared to HDDs. There was this whole problem with janky SSDs, so they described the problem and ran tests on those other low-end SSDs.
We've come so far!
eddieobscurant - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
The bapco benchmark is useless. The differences are negligible . Please don't include it in the new 2017 benchmark suite.lilmoe - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
Totally disappointed. This just gets a tiny bit closer to the 850 EVO, yet it's a bit more expensive ($20 more for 512GB drives).I was hoping Samsung would be under real pressure to lower prices, but this just makes the 850 EVO seem a bit more competitive; it's a bit cheaper, proven for a while to be reliable (ie: a safer bet), and supports more features like encryption.
Seriously, are they even trying? Hoping some REAL competition is on the way shortly from the others...
I smell price fixing shenanigans.
Impulses - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
It's kind of startling how long the 850 EVO has dominated for... It launched at the end of 2014, over 2.5yrs ago now, and pricing has remained more or less constant for the last 2 years (at least for the 1TB I've bought, same today as in the summer of 2015).When has a single storage product ever had that long of a run without a serious challenger? Even Samsung decided to ride it after quickly iterating (and suffering some issues along the way) thru the 430 - 830 - 840.