The Silicon Motion SM2262EN SSD Controller Preview: Good And Bad Amplified
by Billy Tallis on August 1, 2018 11:45 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.
The difference between freshly-erased and full drive test run performance is greater for the Silicon Motion SM2262EN than for any other drive. The fresh out of the box performance on the Light test is faster than anything else we've tested, and the full-drive performance is below par for a mainstream SATA SSD. Where this drive transitions between these two modes and how steep that transition is will make or break the product.
Despite having a slightly higher average data rate, the SM2262EN has slightly worse average and 99th percentile latency scores than the Samsung 970 EVO. When the drive is full, the average latency is almost as high as the Crucial MX500 SATA drive, and the 99th percentile latency is worse.
Average read and write latencies from the SM2262EN are more or less tied for first place when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drive is full the read latency is a bigger problem than write latency: reads are slower than the MX500, while writes stay in low-end NVMe territory.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores are good but not the best for the empty drive test run. When the SM2262EN is full, both scores are vastly worse, with the 99th percentile read latency ending up twice as slow as the Crucial MX500.
The SM2262EN's energy consumption during the Light test is slightly higher than average for the empty-drive test runs, and higher than any other M.2 drive when the test is run on a full drive.
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Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
The sustained I/O synthetic tests move far too much data for DRAM caching of user data to have much impact. The burst I/O tests could theoretically benefit from using DRAM as a write cache, but it doesn't look like that's the case based on these results, and I don't think Silicon Motion would really want to add such a complication to their firmware.leexgx - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
don't think any SSD has used the DRAM as cache (only used for PAGE table) i could speed things up a little but your still limited by the NAND speed any way, Writing directly to NAND makes more senseMikewind Dale - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
That drop in performance in the Heavy test, going from empty to full, was horrifying. I'd like to see some additional tests where the drive gets progressively closer to full. At what point does the drive's performance plummet? Is it gradual or sudden?With other drives, it doesn't matter so much. Most of them have approximately (within 10-20%) the same performance when empty or full, so a person using a full drive will still get approximately the same experience no matter how much they use the drive. But the SM2262EN loses about 80%(!!!!) of its performance when full. So it would be important to know how quickly or gradually this loss occurs as the drive fills.
jjj - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Any chance you are going to the Flash Memory Summit? Might be an interesting year.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Yep, we'll be at FMS next week. Tuesday is going to be a very busy day.jjj - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Great, looking forward to your reports!Death666Angel - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Considering this thing is still in a beta state, I don't think any further investigation into the full state performance is beneficial to us consumers. But if a SM2262EN SSD hits the shelves and is buyable, then a look into different states of fullness and the corresponding performance will be greatly appreciated. :D Good test and SSD controller so far.DigitalFreak - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
I would definitely like to see this with a retail drive.iwod - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
So have we reached peak SSD? If even Optane don't give us any user perceived performance, then surely user would choose larger capacity SSD than 3GB/s vs 2GB/s SSD.Right now we need price to drop faster. 500GB PCI-E SSD with 1GB/s + Speed should be under $100.
rpg1966 - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
"Silicon Motion's second-generation NVMe SSD controllers have all but taken over the consumer NVMe SSD market. Drives like the HP EX920 and ADATA SX8200 currently offer great performance at prices that are far lower than what Samsung and Western Digital are charging for their flagship products."This (kind of) implies that the controller is the biggest cost element of a drive. Does anyone have a rough breakdown of parts costs for a drive like this, i.e. controller, DRAM, NAND, and the board+ancillaries?