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 - 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. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Intel 545s delivers a much faster average data rate on the Light test than the 540s, and is even slightly faster than the Crucial MX300. It isn't quite up to the level of the Samsung drives, but it's reasonably close. The ADATA SU800 takes first place here, showing that it is optimized for high peak performance at the expense of very poor performance under sustained heavy workloads.
The average latency of the Intel 545s on the Light test is nothing special, but that's still an improvement over the 540s, or the MX300 when the test is run on a full drive.
All of the TLC SSDs suffer from significantly higher read latency when the Light test is run on a full drive rather than an empty drive. The MLC-based Samsung 850 PRO is only slightly affected, and the Intel 545s is less severely affected than the Crucial MX300 or the Intel 540s. The empty-drive write latency of the 545s is significantly better than the 540s but still slightly behind the other 3D NAND SSDs. When the test is run on a full drive, the write latency of the Crucial MX300 spikes and the 545s ends up tied with the SU800 and trailing only the Samsung drives.
The Light test is easy enough that the Crucial MX300 has the best power consumption whether the test is run on a full drive or an empty drive. The Intel 540s and 545s are essentially tied for second place, with the Samsung 850 EVO right behind. The Samsung 850 PRO is the only true outlier here: it generally sacrifices some power efficiency to deliver the best performance, but the Light test doesn't stress it enough for that to matter.
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cybertec69 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link
There is no NANDI shortage, it's all a bunch of nonsense, it's nothing more than price gouging.patrickjp93 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Yes there is. Factories are converting all of their equipment from planar to 3D. It takes time just to move everything, then tune yields, and boost to mass production. On top of that, NAND demand has doubled in the past 2 years. There is a very real shortage.AnTech - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
How does it compare to the current gold standard (Samsung Portable SSD T3)?Samsung Portable SSD T3 is so amazing that keeps cold even when booting Mac and working from it all day long. Really remarkable and amazing!
BTW, bring much larger sizes of 4 TB and more! And much cheaper prices!
Hurr Durr - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
>portable ssd>gold standard
In what, waiting for the file transfer to finish?
mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Regarding the "Random read performance" metric as outlined in http://www.anandtech.com/show/9009/ocz-vector-180-...Do you think it makes more sense to give 50%:37.5:12.5% weights to QD1:QD2:QD4 , instead of taking simple average?
Doubleslash - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Can you please do some meaningful IOPS, bandwidth and latency tests with fio or iozone? Things like sustained random 4k/8k/16k IOPS and large-block (64k/256k/512k/1024k) sequential read and write throughput are much better suited to compare wear-leveling, cache and controller performance.You can omit these SYSmark test as they are pretty useless. As the result indicates they do not stress the disk subsystem very much.
jardows2 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Reviewing these charts, this product falls between the EVO and the MX300, but only slightly better than the MX300. It appears that the only realistic differences between the 545 and the MX300 are seen when the MX300 is full. Who uses their drives full? The current $20 price premium of the 545 over the MX300 doesn't seem worth it for the small gains, unless Intel can improve performance with some firmware updates.Wolfpup - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Wish companies would release MLC if not SLC drives too... Really not excited about being stuck with TLC.And I'm YEARS past caring about the performance of any of these drives, unless there's something weird about them. I care about reliability.
Hell, a few of my systems (not main systems, but still) boot if 5400RPM mechanical drives, and are fine. I really don't care if word launches in 0.0001 seconds or 0.0002 seconds or whatever LOL
piiman - Saturday, July 22, 2017 - link
"I really don't care if word launches in 0.0001 seconds or 0.0002 seconds or whatever LOL"Blasphemy!
alpha754293 - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link
I look forward to seeing how it performs on the random write tests...I have four Intel 540 series 1 TB SSD drives at home and they're ok. I traded off speed for capacity and cost, and I didn't know that this was launching, so this was sort of a welcomed surprise.