The Silicon Motion SM2262EN SSD Controller Preview: Good And Bad Amplified
by Billy Tallis on August 1, 2018 11:45 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The SM2262EN improves on the SM2262's already class-leading performance on the Heavy test, with an average data rate that is about 12% higher. However, this comes at the cost of reduced performance when the test is run on a full drive—and that was already the biggest weakness of the SM2262 drives.
The average and 99th percentile latencies show an even more stark dichotomy in the SM2262EN's performance characteristics. When the Heavy test is run on a freshly-erased drive, the latency is impressively low and the 99th percentile QoS score is unprecedented. But when the drive fills up, it completely leaves the high-end performance bracket.
Under favorable conditions, the SM2262EN manages to beat the average read latency of the slower Optane SSD, and it offers the top-notch average write latency that the SM2262 drives couldn't quite manage. But when the drive is full, read latency gets pushed to SATA levels and write latency increases by an order of magnitude.
The 99th percentile write latency of the SM2262EN when the Heavy test is run on a freshly-erased drive is less than a third that of any other drive, and the 99th percentile read latency is second only to the Optane SSD 900P. When this drive has plenty of spare area and SLC cache space, it's extremely fast. But fill it up and we're back to low-end NVMe performance that's considerably worse than the 1TB HP EX920.
Energy usage by the SM2262EN drive on the Heavy test is comparable to the SM2262 drives, but with a much bigger disparity between the empty and full drive test runs. Even without the full-drive problems, this wouldn't be the best choice for a laptop.
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Death666Angel - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
I don't read it that way, but okay. :) I don't have a definitve cost breakdown of an SSD. But my best guess is NAND is still the factor #1 and goes up with capacity. #2 would be the controller or the RAM, depending on size of the SSD, which usually correlates with the size of the RAM. But controllers can cost a few dollars or a few tens of dollars, so that is still a relevant number in pricing of an SSD. Samsung and WD price their drives that way. because they can, so far.FunBunny2 - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
well, here's the problem. if you're an economist, then marginal cost is the driver of price in a competitive market. whether that's true for SSD/SSDparts is murky. for the accountant/MBA types, average cost drives price, regardless of market.now, the crunchy aspect of correlating cost to price is the production process. in the 19th century, labor was a significant component of cost and thus price. demand slackens, fire people to keep both costs more or less stable. demand increases, hire for the same effect.
in the 21st century, with SSD/SSDparts, there's virtually no labor in direct production, so marginal cost is near 0; ergo the econ types say to drop price to move more product. the accountant/MBA types recognize that most of average cost, while higher than marginal, is mostly amortization of R&D and capital equipment (all those new fabs AT has been reporting on, recall?). even they understand that the decision is the same as the econ, a very rare event: the only way to make money is to move more product and drive down average cost. but they can only do this is demand increases. and that can only happen if end-user product vendors can 1) more ways to use the parts, and 2) people have more money to buy the end-user product.
1) is largely a substitution exercise; i.e. a zero-sum game among end-user product vendors. there's no growth in aggregate demand for end-user product, thus none for SSD/SSDparts. nobody wins.
2) is a purely macro-economic phenomenon, and thus dependent on the 'middle class' having more moolah to spend on more bling. you can see where this is going? with right-wing governments driving income concentration, aggregate demand eventually collapses. this is exactly what created the Great Recession.
end-user product vendors can't directly move 2), all they can do is encourage their governments to spread the wealth so that aggregate demand can grow, and they can sell more product. on the whole, they haven't shown the smarts to see where their bread is buttered. as labor cost diminishes, just firing bodies gains you less and less until it gains you nothing. growth in highly capitalized production economies of the 21st century doesn't work as it did in the primitive 19th.
greggm2000 - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
What I'd really like to see are SSD tests done on an (user) encrypted drive. Would performance be equivalent to a fully filled drive? I imagine this would be a fairly common use case?Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Software encryption does technically leak information if it uses TRIM commands or otherwise signals to the drive what data is and isn't valid. It also imposes performance overhead from doing the encryption on the CPU . There aren't many reasons to justify using software full-drive encryption on a SSD when self-encrypting SSDs are so common (Samsung, Crucial MX, etc).Icehawk - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
Is Opal effected by this? What performance cost is there? We’ve got whopping laptop at woro with it enabled buy I’d like to push us in a more secure direction. Would probably help our PCI score too.Chaser - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link
I wish someone would build a review site that includes SSDs that writes reviews based upon a an average PC gamer's performance perspective. I myself have tested the Evo 860, the 970 EVO, Optane 900, the XPG SX8200, and the Patriot Hellfire. Like many other revealing Youtube videos that compare these drives most often the Evo 860 is either faster at loading a game, the same or very slightly slower. While I understand that Anandtech has readers that are looking at higher usage scenarios, I'd venture to say MOST of their readers are in the former category.As it stands today with most similar sites we see chart after chart of benchmarks on multiple pages. We read about accolades on random and sequential performance. Some sites rank the drives from 1-10. But in the end, the user experience differences prove to be negligible for most users and a simple article like that probably would entice site visits to read through the hairsplitting benchmarks.
KAlmquist - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link
I'll repeat something Billy Tallis stated in a comment and probably should incorporate into the text of the review: “I did run the Heavy and Light tests on this drive with it 80% full and the results were similar to the 100% full case.”When I partition an SSD, I've always left a bit of space unused in order to effectively increase the spare area to 20% or so. That improved performance consistency with older SSD designs. With the SM2262EN, it might still reduce write amplification, but not enough to substantially affect performance.
kensiko - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link
I'm hesitating between the AData XPG SX8200 (SM2262) and the pro one (SM2262EN), 50 CAD$ difference. Any opinion ?