The MyDigitalSSD SBX SSD Review: NVMe On The Cheap
by Billy Tallis on May 1, 2018 8:05 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.
On the Light test, almost all NVMe SSDs have the opportunity to significantly outpace all SATA SSDs—when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drives are full, only some of the faster NVMe drives still need the extra bandwidth of PCI Express. The MyDigitalSSD SBX suffers more than most drives from being full, and the effect is more severe at lower capacities. The SBX is still faster than SATA drives in those difficult conditions.
The full-drive test runs show significantly higher average and 99th percentile latency, especially for the smaller capacities of the SBX. The empty-drive test runs show latency that is much more in line with other NVMe drives and is generally much better than how the smaller Intel 760p drives behave.
Almost everything shows a fairly large disparity in average read latency between full and empty drive conditions for the Light test, so the MyDigitalSSD SBX doesn't stand out too much. The full-drive average write latency scores for the SBX aren't the only poor results in the bunch, but they are still outliers compared to NVMe drives in general.
The 99th percentile read and write scores for the MyDigitalSSD SBX show reasonable QoS for the empty-drive test runs, but some of the worst results we've measured for full drive performance. The Intel 760p's results are probably worse for real-world scenarios, because its empty drive latency is almost as bad as the full drive latency.
The three capacities of the MyDigitalSSD SBX all have about the same energy usage on the Light test. Their efficiency scores are great by NVMe standards, but mediocre by the standards of modern SATA drives. The SBX has reduced energy usage almost by half compared to the Phison E7 drives.
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dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
For $53 for a 128GB one, with a 5 year warranty? That's now the boot drive of my server.dgingeri - Monday, May 7, 2018 - link
It has worked remarkably well as a server boot drive. I highly recommend it.vailr - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
An external USB 3.0 connected PCIe M.2 type NVMe adapter would be faster than any USB thumb drive, and would be ideal for a bootable external "Windows to Go". Is such a device available yet?Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-SATA-SSD-E... but compatible with PCIe NVMe M.2 80mm drives, such as this MyDigitalSSD, or the Samsung 960 NVMe, for example.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The only ones I've seen are Thunderbolt adapters, which require a Thunderbolt port. They all come populated with an SSD too. The "cheapest" I've seen is the TekQ Rapide, which while priced below others and with decent performance, isn't exactly cheap at $250PeachNCream - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Since NVMe SSDs still command a price premium even with low cost drives like the SBX out there, it may just not make a lot of sense to build NVMe-to-USB drive enclosures. After all, SATA 3.0 is rated to 6 Gbit/s and USB 3.0 is rated at 5 Gbit/s which means you're already going to be at the saturation point of USB 3.0 with a SATA SSD in a USB enclosure at a relatively low cost for a removable boot drive. I've been doing something like that with a 2.5 inch SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure and a spare 120GB Patriot Torch. Ubuntu happily boots from it and I can't really discern much difference (responsiveness, performance, read/write speed, etc.) between using the drive in the external enclosure and using that same drive on my laptop's internal SATA connector.Death666Angel - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
http://www.microsatacables.com/m-2-ngff-pcie-ssd-t...This explicitly states PCIe (and is out of stock), all others just state SATA M.2. But as Peach described, USB 3.0 is already saturated by SATA 3.0.
You could frankenstein something. Get one of those PCIe slot to USB things the mining community uses, then a PCIe to M.2 NVME adapter and then hope it somehow works. :D Not pretty though. ;)
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The PCIe slots to USB cable just repurpose the pins on the connector to carry PCIe signals. They do NOT follow USB communication protocolsDeath666Angel - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Thanks for that info and sorry for my misinformation. :)MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
No problem. I also checked out the drive you linked, and it only supports the one Samsung OEM drive that uses PCIe with the AHCI protocol, not NVMe. Not sure why it doesn't support NVMe, but it says it doesn't, so good idea to keep an eye on that.dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
That would presume that there is a USB to PCIe adapter chip, which there isn't. Thunderbolt, as previously mentioned, is available, but that is because Thunderbolt is based on PCIe anyway. So, no bridge chip is required.