ATTO

ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.

ATTO Performance

Aside from the write speeds that lag behind read speeds by a larger than normal margin, the ATTO results are reasonable and do not show signs of any major problems.

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.

Incompressible Sequential Read PerformanceIncompressible Sequential Write Performance

None of these drives show any meaningful difference in AS-SSD sequential read speed, but the write speed limitations of the X400 do show up clearly on this test.

Idle Power Consumption

Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.

We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.

Idle Power Consumption (HIPM+DIPM)
Active Idle Power Consumption (No ALPM)

Slumber power drawn by the X400 is not quite the lowest but is still pretty good, but active idle power is twice as high as the OCZ Trion 150 based on the Toshiba TC58/Phison S10 controller platform.

Mixed Read/Write Performance Final Words
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  • Chaitanya - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link

    1TB capacity in M.2 Form factor is tempting.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link

    I like the $/GB, but there aren't enough GBs.
  • Namisecond - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link

    Maybe you need to stop treating SSDs as bulk storage?
  • dsumanik - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link

    Maybe you should go back to floppies.

    It's 2016 and there is no reason for magnetic drives to be alive. Yes yes, I know about cost per gig and all the stats you feel like googling and quoting to me to prove how smart you are, but the real truth is this: it's way more profitable to sell us 50 year old technology cuz dums dums will keep on buying.

    Bring on xpoint, it'll help push traditional flash down into the bargain bin... And for u sir, Ii will gladly mail you my original dos 6.22 install disks if you simply shut the f**k up.
  • santeana - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link

    LMAO! I wish there was a like button!

    +1
  • blakeatwork - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link

    It's a process of how quickly do you need to access certain types of data. OS, programs and games all benefit from being on an SSD (assuming supporting architecture does not have any obvious bottlenecks). I'm not sure browsing photos from a recent vacation really provides the necessary strain on your I/O that requires an SSD :D
    Magnetic drives will stick around for quite a while, especially for Home/SMB NAS devices where the amount of storage is greater then the perceived need for super fast access, which is throttled by GbE network (or WiFi) anyways
  • bug77 - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link

    Modern operating system do lots of stuff in the background, an AV may scan your drives from time to time. This is stuff that kills IO on a HDD and that barely registers on a SSD. So there are reason for moving away from HDDs... But yes, the HDD will stick around for a while, simply because of pricing.
  • jordanclock - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link

    Good thing we just dump all old technology as soon as we find a replacement!
  • edward1987 - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link

    1TB is quite out of my pocket £218 (http://www.span.com/product/SanDisk-X400-SSD-SD8SN... but 512GB I would not mind. If you have Qnap tvs-1282 server or similar - they have m.2 for caching or tiered storage. I can use for it in there.
  • HollyDOL - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link

    There is a mismatch in Specification table:
    1TiB (1024GB) should be 1TB(1000GB)
    According to specs at https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam/sandisk-main/e...

    putting 10^3n and 2^10n prefixes together is just incorrect anyway without correct recalculation...

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