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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
45 Comments
View All Comments
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
There are numerous 8-lane enterprise SSDs already.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
e.g. HGST FlashMAX III and HGST Ultrastar SN260 products are eight-lane devices.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Hey look, another SSD that has no reason whatsoever to exist!I don't understand why manufacturers don't, y'know, try to COMPETE with Samsung instead of re-re-releasing the same old, tired, slow controllers with slightly different but ultimately insignificant spins on them.
DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller. That means almost all of the other companies selling drives have to pick and choose between a handful of controllers made by Phison/etc. Until they recover from Samsung's blind siding them and design new higher performing architectures from the ground up none of them have anything in the same performance class. If what happened at the start of the market when Intel's controllers were unbeatable is any indication we should hopefully have competitive designs available in another year or so.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
-- Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller.well, isn't a controller an implementation of physics and math? which is to say, unless something new happens with NAND chips (not just node size or xLC), may haps we've reached the one-true-answer to the controller problem? may be there's just no more there, there.
Samus - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Wow. That was disappointing.RaistlinZ - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Current Newegg Prices:1. 500GB Samsung 960 Pro = $299.99
2. 1TB Samsung 960 Pro = 600.82
The NX500 has no reason to exist. The price needs to be cut in half to make it even REMOTELY attractive.
alpha754293 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I'm surprised you didn't bother comparing it against the Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe NVMe SSD.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I had originally planned to include the 400GB 750, but some of the results from it looked funny and I decided it wasn't worth postponing the review for several days to re-test the 750. That drive's a pain to test, because I have to run each test twice in order to record the power on both the 3.3V and 12V lines, and the performance has to match between the two runs for the results to be valid.alpha754293 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Depending on how you want to tackle/handle it.There are statistical methods available out there that even with noisy data (e.g. high standard deviations) that you can still use it to process data that might otherwise not make sense at first glance, on the surface.
Course, that would also mean that care would need to be taking so that the tests in and of itself are repeatable.
I only mention it because I would be VERY interested to see how this compared to the Intel 750 series.
Thanks.