Comparing Two 1TB NVMe Drives with Same NAND, Same Controller: XPG SX8200 Pro vs HP EX950
by Billy Tallis on February 6, 2019 11:30 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.
When the Light test is run on an empty drive, the SM2262EN SSDs offer excellent performance, but it's not meaningfully better than what last year's models did with the original SM2262 controller. What's changed is that full-drive performance is much worse, and the gap between empty and full drive performance is much larger for the Light test than for the Heavy test.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the SM2262EN drives are barely slower than the Samsung 970 EVO Plus when the Light test is run on an empty drive, but the full-drive average latency is about as bad as a mainstream SATA drive, and the 99th percentile latencies are worse.
The average read and write latency scores for the SM2262EN drives are within a few microseconds of the fastest drives when the Light test is run on an empty drive, but when the drives are full the read latency ends up in SATA territory and the write latency comes close to that.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores again show no problem for the SM2262EN drives when the Light test is run on an empty drive, but the full-drive performance is a problem. In this case, the 99th percentile read latency is especially bad, with the retail SM2262EN drives scoring worse than the engineering sample and providing tail latencies several times higher than the Crucial MX500 SATA drive.
The SM2262EN drives again show significantly higher energy requirements when the test is run on a full drive rather than an empty drive. The ADATA SXP SX8200 Pro's efficiency advantage over the HP EX950 means the former's efficiency is still decent by NVMe standards even for the full-drive test run.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
42 Comments
View All Comments
Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
That drop in performance for a full drive in the Heavy - and even the Light!! - tests is worrying. They're right around the level of a SATA SSD.My question is, how full is full? If you fill the drive up 99%, is its performance closer to empty or full? With all my SSDs, I typically leave about 10% of the drive unallocated (unpartitioned). How would the drive perform in this state?
I would be interested in seeing results for a drive that is almost full, but not quite full. I imagine that most people don't use their drives up until the final MB is used. Still, if a cost-conscious person is trying to get their money's worth, they might use the drive until it's 90-something percent full. Until recently, I was using a 512 GB SATA SSD with a real capacity of 476.8 GB. I used it until I was using 420 GB, at which point I upgraded to a 2 TB drive. So I was using 88% of its capacity. To me, that seems like a reasonable usage to test - not quite full, but almost full.
Targon - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
I would suspect that the reason for this might be thermal throttle issues. Throw a heat sink on there, and the performance downgrade might disappear. The versions with a pre-installed heatsink might be worth the money, depending on how much it would cost to buy a SSD heatsink at this point(I haven't looked).BillyONeal - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Seems more likely to be reduction in the size of the SLC cache -- see the the filling the drive tests where there are 3 distinct phases depending on how much space is actually in use.jabber - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I must admit I still leave a few GB spare/unallocated on any SSD I install. 2GB on a 120GB, 4GB on a 240GB and 8GB on a 500GB. Old habits.reactor_au - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
I was wondering the same thing, how full can one get before performance drops off the cliff like in the benchmarks? Its a very import detail to omit!Luckz - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
At 80% full it was really tragic in this review of the 256GB size https://pclab.pl/art79361-9.htmlMikewind Dale - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
I also notice that these drives don't have an active power state less than 3.8W. That's unfortunate, because as Ganesh T S noted in his Anandtech review of the MyDigitalSSD M2X M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, that enclosure will only work with SSDs that have an active power state less than 3.8W.I think this is important because it determines whether you can continue to use the SSD as a portable drive after you upgrade later. If you replace your 2 TB with a 4 or 8 TB SSD someday in the future, it will be nice to know that you can repurpose your 2 TB as an external drive.
Also, it determines whether you can easily upgrade your SSD when all your M.2 slots are full. Whenever I upgrade a SATA boot drive, I typically use an external USB enclosure to clone the current SATA drive (still installed internally) to the new SATA drive (inside the enclosure). Then I can swap the two drives, and my computer will transparently use the new drive. With M.2, this is even more important because many motherboards have only two M.2 sockets. So if you have both M.2 sockets filled and try to upgrade one of the M.2 drives, you'll have a bit of a challenge. You could buy a PCIe-M.2 card and use that, but using an external USB enclosure is more convenient.
So I'd like to see more M.2 drives with a sub-3.8 W active power state. The Samsung 970 EVO Plus has a 3.4 W active state, so it passes this test.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
I love ADATA's naming scheme! It's so easily memorable and has more X's than any other brand.eddieobscurant - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Nice review , as always although I disagree with your conclusion. Peak performance is what most people want.Billy Tallis - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
My reviews are intended to advise consumers who are buying SSDs to increase their productivity, not people who are trying to set a high score on Crystal Disk Mark.People who care about real-world productivity rather than CDM scores should recognize that imperceptible improvements to peak performance are probably not worth the sacrifice of significant regressions in performance on niche heavy workloads. For a lot of users, both SM2262 and SM2262EN drives are fast enough. Beyond those lighter use cases, I think it will be more common to find the SM2262EN coming up short in a meaningful way than to find it providing a tangible performance advantage over SM2262.