The Samsung 860 PRO (512GB And 4TB) SSD Review: Replacing A Legend
by Billy Tallis on January 23, 2018 10:00 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.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
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.
In addition to load power efficiency improvements, the 860 PRO brings modest improvements to idle power consumption. Samsung's active idle power consumption was already pretty good, but the 860 PRO provides further savings. The idle power in slumber state is a big improvement for both of the 860 PROs, likely due to the use of LPDDR4.
The idle wake-up latency of Samsung's drives hasn't changed, and is still hovering just above 1ms.
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StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Or. We could finally transition to Sata 3.3 which offers 1,900MB/s.PixyMisa - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
SATA Express is dead. U.2 is twice as fast and better supported.I'd like to see internal drives move to USB-C. Better connector, faster, universally supported, and any internal drive just works as an external drive.
Would need USB RAID controllers though.
peevee - Tuesday, January 30, 2018 - link
You mean 3.2, SATA Express, with 2 PCI Express lines? Seems like it is the past, U.2 superseding it.Roen - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
SATA Express has been a non-starter and DOA.This is why people use M.2, U.2 and other non-SATA PCIe interfaces.
Roen - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
M.2 NVMe I should be more specific.Roen - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
PCIe 3.0 x4 beats PCIe 3.0 x2 from SATA 3.2Gastec - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
I have an 8 year old PC that was designed from the start without an internal DVD drive as I had no need for one, having used an external USB DVD unit since like 2009. I have not plugged in the external DVD for more than a year, maybe two years. The PC sports 2 SSDs (one for the OS and the other for games) and only one old and annoying HDD that I seriously consider replacing with a SSD to have a more relaxed, vibration-free computing experience. I this day and age a computer enthusiast is more stressed than ever and values a quiet, vibration-free system. So the HDD must go!appliance5000 - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
What are DVDs?chrcoluk - Friday, April 12, 2019 - link
unless ssd's can match spindles price per gig, then yes sata will most definitely still be around in 5 years as its what powers spindle drives. Also good luck in finding boards that support 8 nvme devices.generaldwarf - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
And the mx500 is the new king of TLC, less expensive than the evo for the same thing.