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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Mikewind Dale - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
I'd like to see a low performance M.2 PCIe to USB enclosure just to make it easier to format and transfer drives. E.g., suppose you have a laptop with one M.2, and you want to upgrade. You'll have to make a disk image from M.2 PCIe, copy it to a SATA USB drive, then install the new M.2 drive and copy the image. You need a third drive in between. It'd be nice to copy straight from one M.2 drive to the other.dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Well, as far as that goes, it would be nice if laptop makers would replace the 3.5" bay with two m.2 slots so it wouldn't be so much trouble for those very things. However, it seems laptop makers have their heads about as far up their behinds as is possible.peevee - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
You will have zero benefit from NVMe on USB 3.0. Maybe USB 3.2.Samus - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Is there some reason the WD Black NVMe results are missing from all your charts, when you just did a review of that drive?Seems kind of weird considering it's this drives natural competitor.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The new WD Black is more of a high-end NVMe drive in both price and performance. I didn't want to make the graphs too large, and I only have 1TB samples of the WD Black so it wouldn't be a fair comparison against the 512GB and smaller SBX.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
seems that Crucial MX500 is a VERY good drive taking everything into accountprice is "reasonable" performance is also "reasonable" given the price.
to each their own, I kind of like the good ol 2.5" sata drive, they do not seem to have any throttle from heat related crud that so many of the u2 or m2 (whatever version you want to call them)
as pretty much all mobo put them really close to massive heat producing parts such as cpu or gpu and those stupid heatshields 9/10 are useless as crud ^.^
the other side of NVME based is not only does your motherboard have to support such (from OS as well as mobo point of view) seems there are many of them out there that are not as plug and play as they should be considering the cost IMO.
I am ok with a corvette over a station wagon (i.e SSD vs HDD) I do not have need to pay that extra $$$$$$ for a ferrari (that seems that given the proper workload are obviously WAY faster, but, run of the mill race, SSD are already fast enough and much more costly than a standard HDD to begin with)
moheban79 - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link
Anyone know if these nvme drives come with legacy option roms?peevee - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Looks to me the drives were not in NVMe mode. Random performance should not be so much lower than SATA drives.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
NVMe is not a "mode", and random performance is dependent on the drive, not the interface (up to a point)dgingeri - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
Actually, yes, NVMe is a mode. The other mode is AHCI under PCIe, and all NVMe drives can operate in AHCI mode, and yes it does hurt random performance because the instruction parallelism allowed isn't nearly as wide under AHCI mode.https://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/testing-sata-e...