The Corsair Neutron NX500 (400GB) PCIe SSD Review: Big Card, Big Pricetag
by Billy Tallis on August 16, 2017 10:00 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 Corsair Neutron NX500 delivers a better average data rate on the Heavy test than the other Phison drives, especially when the test is run on a full drive, a case that the Patriot Hellfire handles particularly badly. The other MLC-based NVMe SSDs all perform better than the NX500.
The average latency provided by the NX500 on the Heavy test is only modestly slower than the competing drives using the same NAND but different controllers. Against the other Phison drives that differ primarily in firmware, the NX500 is the fastest. When considering 99th percentile latencies the Patriot Hellfire slightly outperforms the NX500 when the test is run on an empty drive, and the overall spread of scores between the Phison drives and the fastest drives in this bunch is a bit smaller.
The average read latency of the NX500 on the Heavy test is pretty good: only about 20-30µs slower than the fastest 15nm MLC drive, and Samsung's 950 PRO is only a little bit faster than that. The average write latency of the NX500 and the other Phison E7 drives is more than twice as high than the best 3D NAND SSDs, and substantially worse than the other 15nm MLC drives.
As with the average latencies, the 99th percentile read latency of the NX500 is pretty good while on the write side it's slower than average, but not horrible. The Zotac SONIX is the slowest of the three Phison drives, but also the one with the least performance drop when the Heavy test is run on a full drive.
The NX500 on the Heavy test again comes in last place for power efficiency, with the Zotac SONIX only slightly beating it. The Patriot Hellfire's power consumption score is good by the standards of planar NAND PCIe SSDs.
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shabby - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
According to toms review the 500gb one still does 2gb/s read/write at qd1, nothing touches it.Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Yes, according to Tom's and others, the 500 GB 960 EVO is still the drive to have in its size class - which is why I bought one. On the other hand the 256 GB 960 EVO doesn't stand up against the competition like the 500 and up drives do. So, when comparing these drives with an eye to actually purchasing one, its a great idea to find reviews of the actual size you are looking at and comparing against other like sized drives.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Trouble with the EVO is when its cache is full it can't take the heavy writes, and its random & steady state performance are not that great. They're good enough (I bought a 250GB for my brother), but the Pro is way better, and the 950 Pro is better aswell.CrazyElf - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
This doesn't justify the premium over SATA SSDs.Unlike say, the Samsung SSD 960 series or the Intel SSD 750, which do have something to offer, especially when it comes to sequential performance, these drives really struggle to justify the premium.
Yeah it seems increasingly like Intel (SSD 750 dominates sustained writes on 4k) and Samsung (dominates most other benchmarks).
I mean, products like Optane are expensive, but at least they have some premium (ex: the good 4k performance).
versesuvius - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Corsair expects to be paid higher for whatever it puts together no matter what. The same is true with Cooler Master and Logitech. For each single one of their products there is an equivalent product on the market that is higher in quality and performance and considerably lower in price.valinor89 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I don't know about Cooler Master, but logitech sells plenty of cheap stuff and some products have very good prices for what they offer. The G502 was quite the revolution in perf/price and I find my G610 to have very good quality compared to Corsais Oferings.Bullwinkle J Moose - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
With PCIe lane counts coming up, I hope to see Samsung and Intel start using themWith a full 16 lanes being used, benchmarking can finally change along with the SSD processors/firmware
Intel may take the lead with xpoint initially, but with the ability to run several simultaneous tests on an SSD max iop / mixed mode, copy/paste, 100GB uncompressed read speed, 100GB uncompressed write as well as torture tests as the onboard processors finally catch up to the lane counts, I think Samsung may yet have a few surprises for xpoint
4 lanes ain't gonna cut it for my 16 core cpu
Get with the times!
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
No matter how many PCIe lanes your ThreadRipper CPU has available (assume that's what you are talking about since you say 16 core) the spec for NVMe is still x4Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
NVMe has nothing to say about PCIe lane counts. You're probably thinking about the M.2 connector, but that is hardly the only way to connect a PCIe SSD.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Yes, it is when NVMe is used through U.2 and M.2 that you get four-lane PCIe. When used through SATA Express, NVMe is stuck with two-lane PCIe.