Corsair Neutron XT (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Phison S10 Debuts
by Kristian Vättö on November 17, 2014 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based – we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, StarCraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, Ad-Aware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
The Neutron XT offers a healthy performance boost over the Force LS in our 2013 Storage Bench, but overall ends up in the middle-class. The Phison S10 platform appears to be very competitive with Silicon Motion's SM2246EN (ADATA SP610 in the graphs), but it can't challenge the high-end drives from Samsung, SanDisk, and OCZ.
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SanX - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
One more average drive. Speeds need to double or price drop to double for that stuff to be interesting again.hojnikb - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
Yup. If this ends up being priced closer to 850pro, it wont make any sense whatsoever.hojnikb - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
Any reason why they are using 64Gbit flash on 480GB aswell ?at 512GB raw flash, it should be enough to saturate controller with 128Gbit dies (thats 32 dies).
SleepyFE - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
How did you count 32 dies? 4x128=512, that's 4 dies. With 8 dies (8x64) you fill all eight channels. Better parallelism. That's how i understand it.Mikemk - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
4*128Gbit = 4*16GB = 64GB32*128Gbit = 32*16GB=512GB
hojnikb - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Its in Gigabits, not gigabytes. Single die is 128Gbit (so 16GB) so you need 32 of them to get 512GB.SleepyFE - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Sorry about that. So used to gigabytes. Aren't the dies stacked to make 64GB packages and then a single bus leads to that bundle?makerofthegames - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
tl;dr it's not a bad drive, but it's not good in any particular niche. If it's not cheaper than the dozens of similarly good-enough drives out there, it's a dead product.beginner99 - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
Exactly. And given the crucial mx100 pricing and performance which should suit almost any consumer and enthusiast it's hard to come up for any reason to buy this unless it is cheaper (highly doubt that). And if you really need ultimate performance you will go Sandisk or 950 pro (or intel pcie).Mikemk - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
850 pro?