The Toshiba XG5 (1TB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on August 3, 2017 9:01 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
The active power consumption of the Toshiba XG5 is very close to that of Samsung's 960 PRO and EVO, but the WD Black and Intel 600p are even better. However, all of these drives have much higher active idle power use than is typical for SATA SSDs.
The idle power consumption of the XG5 with all the power-saving features turned on is again close to Samsung, but slightly higher and the WD Black puts even Samsung to shame.
The wake-up latencies from the idle power states reported above vary widely. The Intel SSD 750 doesn't support any of the advanced power management features of NVMe and thus has a minimal wake-up latency. The Patriot Hellfire's APST implementation is broken, causing it to also not use any power saving mode on our testbed. While the Toshiba XG5 was close to Samsung in terms of power saved, its wake-up latency is an order of magnitude higher than that of the 960 PRO and 960 EVO, and almost 150 times higher than the 950 PRO. The WD Black clearly pays a price for its great power saving with a wake-up latency of over 120ms.
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Billy Tallis - Monday, August 7, 2017 - link
We always try to get as many different capacities as possible. Some vendors are more willing than others to sample one of each size. Lately with the flash shortage, most vendors have been hesitant to send the full range of samples, and even after the product launches their PR teams have pretty limited sample availability.When I'm reviewing a single drive, I try to include primarily other drives from the same capacity class. If you want to compare eg. a 250 GB NVMe drive against a 512GB SATA drive, that's what our Bench database is for. (Though I haven't posted the 2017 results to Bench yet, and won't have time for that until after Flash Memory Summit.)
Bullwinkle J Moose - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
NewEgg insiders could buy the Samsung 850 Pro this week for $109 (256GB)A 10 year warranty on the Worlds Fastest consumer SATA drive turned out to be less expensive than a slower TLC drive with 3 - 5 year warranty then adding an extended warranty
Or you could just save $10 and get a slower TLC drive with a crappy warranty
Your choice
Kwarkon - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Hi, you state that you have L1.2 enabled in your Idle powertest but clearly it is not working on your setup.I guess you use PCIe vertical to m.2 adapter and because of that you cannot go lower than L1.
SanX - Monday, August 14, 2017 - link
A year later and still 3x slower then Samsung 960 ? Why this company still exists?