SanDisk Extreme II Review (480GB, 240GB, 120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2013 7:19 PM ESTPower Consumption
We're introducing a new part of our power consumption testing with this review: measurement of slumber power with host initiated power management (HIPM) and device initiated power management (DIPM) enabled. It turns out that on Intel desktop platforms, even with HIPM and DIPM enabled, SSDs will never go into their lowest power states. In order to get DIPM working, it seems that you need to be on a mobile chipset platform. I modified an ASUS Zenbook UX32VD to allow me to drive power to the drive bay from an external power supply/power measurement rig. I then made sure HIPM+DIPM were enabled, and measured average power with the drive in an idle state. The results are below:
Samsung does amazingly well in this test, with only Intel's first generation X25-M SSD coming anywhere close. The SanDisk drives do alright here, although they're a bit more power hungry than some of the others the differences aren't large enough to meaningfully impact most notebook usage. The important thing to note is just how bad power consumption can get if your drive doesn't properly support HIPM and DIPM. It's when you start getting into the 500mW - 1000mW range that you'll see real impacts to notebook battery life.
Our traditional idle power test is still useful as this is representative of power consumption in an active idle state. The lowest power states do take time to get in/out of, so if you're actively using your machine you may see some time spent in a non-slumber idle state which is effectively the data you see below:
Once again, the Extreme II does alright here. Idle power consumption isn't high enough to be a problem for notebook users, it's just not low enough to be as good as Samsung.
Under load the story is a little different. Peak sequential IO power consumption is very Samsung-like, but power consumption with a random write workload is amazingly low. I suspect this is a side effect of whatever SanDisk is doing to keep IO consistency in check.
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klmccaughey - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link
Hey, as one of these here "Coders" I can tell you my bread and butter is a ratio of 10:1 on thinking to coding ;) I suspect most programmers are similar.tipoo - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
But in a sense Tukano is right, the SATA 3 standard can already be saturated by the fastest SSDs, so the connections between components are indeed the bottleneck. Most SSDs are still getting there, but the standard was saturated by the best almost as soon as it became widespread. They need a much bigger hop next time to leave some headroom.A5 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
The first round of SATA Express will give 16 Gbps for standard drives and up to 32 Gbps for mPCIe-style cards (used to be known as NGFF). I think we'll see a cool round of enthusiast drives once NGFF is finalized.althaz - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Storage is almost always the bottleneck. Faster storage = faster data moving around your PC's various subsystems. It's always better. You are certainly not likely to actually notice the incremental improvements from drive to the next, but it's important that these improvements are made, because you sure as hell WILL notice upgrading from something 5-6 generations different.What causes your PC to boot in 30 seconds is a combination of a lot of things, but seeing as mine boots in much closer to 5 seconds, I suspect you must be running a Windows 7 without a really fast SSD (I'm running 8 with an Intel 240Gb 520 series drive).
sna1970 - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
not really.Storage is never a bottle neck . if you have enough memory , they will load once to the memory and thats it.
you need to eliminate the need to read the same data again thats all.
try to max your memory to 32G or 64 G , and make a 24G Ramdisk and install the application you want there. you will have instant running programs. there is no real bottlenecks.
kevith - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link
"Closer to 5 seconds".... From what point do you start counting...?seapeople - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link
Probably after he logs in.compvter - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
5 seconds would be very fast, i get to windows desktop in w8 in 11 seconds. Calculated from pressing the power button on my laptop and stopped when i get to real desktop (not metro). I have older samsung 830 and first generation i7 cpu and 16gb memory.ickibar1234 - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
After getting an SSD with a SATA 3 computer, it's mostly likely driver initialization, timers and stuff like that that is the bottleneck during bootup.Occas - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Regarding PC Boot time, easily for me it was my motherboard post time.My old Asus took minimum 20 seconds to post! When I bought my new system I researched post times and ended up with an ASRock which posts in about 5 seconds. Boom, now I can barely sit down before I'm ready to log in. :)