PCIe SSD Faceoff: Samsung XP941 (128GB & 256GB) and OCZ RevoDrive 350 (480GB) Tested
by Kristian Vättö on September 5, 2014 3:00 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 – Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.
In our 2011 suite the 256GB XP941 is still strong, but the 128GB model and RevoDrive 350 are no better than a SATA drive. The 128GB XP941 simply lacks parallelism because of its small capacity, whereas the RevoDrive is better suited for very intensive workloads (like the 2013 suite). The average service times (although not graphed here) are still better than what SATA drives offer, but the truth is that a RAID array will only help if there are more IO to process i.e. in high queue depth and large transfer situations.
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Riemenschneider - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
I like the M.2 form factor a lot, just a shame that there are so few ITX boards with support, not for FM2+ and also not for the SoC stuff :(. No real reason to go for a M.2 drive yet, though, but that is going to change as soon as the NVMe SSDs are going to be released.hojnikb - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
I wonder why OCZ didn't went with their barefoot controller (the one in vector150) instead of sandforce. Sandforce is getting really dated now and using it in a premium product like revodrive is kinda silly in 2014.themeinme75 - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
I would like you to add this drive to the review. It reads and writes at nearly 2GB/s.. i not positive it's bootable. It basically 4 ssd in raid. I wonder if someone is working on a pcie3 that would hold 4 1TB m.2 so you get 4tb bootable with like 4GB/s...Mushkin Enhanced Scorpion Deluxe MKNP44SC240GB-DX PCIe 240GB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) PCIe 2.0 x8 $456.31
Mushkin · Internal · 240 GB · Solid State
Other capacity options: 480GB ($700) 960GB ($1,071) 1920GB ($1,747)
TelstarTOS - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
Still waiting for Intel 3600 test at low capacities (I think 400GB is the lowest) which has a decent pricepoint and it should be slightly better than the SP941 512GB.isa - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
Looking forward to NVMe PCIe M.2 SSDs, but I'm really disappointed in the pricing so far: one can get a 2.5 inch SATA SSD for about $0.50/GB, and while I'd thought that the M.2 format would afford significant cost savings, these SSDs are over $1/GB. Is that just a temporary supply/demand artifact, or is there some kind of huge licensing cost or additional tech complexity costs that hit M.2 that doesn't hit 2.5 inch SATA?TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
A mix of it being brand new technology, low demand (there's, what, 3 non 2011 boards that use it, and a handful of laptops) vs the high demand for data 3 ( every computer made today) and a lack of manufacturers. Most are still making data drives, so those that make m.2 can command a price premium.TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
Data 3, not data 3. When will anandtech conceive an edit button?TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
Sata is a word, android. Stop autocorrecting.Beany2013 - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link
It's OK, it was clear from the context as to what you meant :)I think I'll be waiting for M.2 to become more commonplace before updating my current rig (A8-3870, 16gb RAM, SSD 830) then as there's unlikely to be any real performance/£ increase until the earth moving CPUs are dropped/replaced, and PCIe SSDs are more common/cheaper.
(Yes, I like my AMD hardware because I'm cheap and like lots of real threads)
The performance numbers we're seeing from these - effectively first generation - devices are very encouraging though, so I'm looking forward to that point in perhaps two years time when I can throw £500 at a build and get another machine that is hilariously quick for the money.
fredey - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link
If I didn't already miss it I would like to see a raid round up the the revodrive 350 the mushkin skorpion deluxe and a standard sata 6Gbps setup with something along the lines of four samsung 850 pros in raid 0