Previewing Maxiotek's MK8115 SSD Controller: Can DRAM-less Drives Make The Cut?
by Billy Tallis on May 9, 2017 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
As expected, the MK8115 drives perform relatively poorly overall on The Destroyer. The TLC drive's average data rate is about 20% slower than the next slowest drive in this comparison. The MLC sample actually manages to slightly outperform the earlier JMicron drives, which weren't even handicapped by a lack of external DRAM. However, relative to current MLC drives, the MK8115 MLC drive is about 25% slower overall on this test.
The average service times of the MK8115 drives aren't particularly bad. The TLC drive's average service time is lower than either of the other two SATA drives using the same Micron 3D TLC. The MK8115 sample with MLC is slower than the Samsung 850 PRO and PNY CS2211, but slightly faster than the JMicron drives and the OCZ VX500.
The MK8115 drives do a decent job of keeping latency under control, with the MLC drive in particular having about the same number of outliers above 10ms as the best SATA SSDs. The MK8115 with TLC has some trouble but still has far fewer outliers above 10ms than the ADATA SU800.
However, when looking at the number of extreme latency outliers above 100ms, the MK8115 drives are the worst in the bunch and even the MLC drive scores worse than all the competing TLC solutions.
The power efficiency of the MK8115 drives is decent. Even though these drives take a bit longer to complete the test, the total energy used over the course of the test isn't any higher than most of the competition.
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jardows2 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I fondly remember when new developments in SSD products resulted in lower prices AND better performance. Now it seems that every new product is geared only for lower prices, and the performance is getting worse! Not to mention that the prices have gone up substantially in the past year, I don't think we are at the best value time for SSD's.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Can you provide evidence of performance getting worse? I haven't seen groundbreaking performance strides in anything but high-end/upper-mid (Samsung 960 series), but I haven't seen a performance regression.Sonic01 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
i actually found this today, i was looking for a new budget 1tb SSD.my current is a crucial m500 from 2013 i bagged for about £450, now the cheapest 1tb ss'd are about £300 but overall performance is about 30% of the m500..... in 4 years they have dropped 30% of the cost at the expense of 60% of the speed...
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I looked on amazon.co.uk and the Samsung 850 Evo is 300 for 1TB. I also paged around in Anandtech reviews, and it has better performance than the M500, sometimes significantly so. The MX300 is 250 for 1TB, and it also scores very well on reviews, although I didn't do a very thorough comparison to the M500, it seems a little lower in performance compared to the 850Evo, which should still put it slightly ahead of the M500AlphaBlaster - Sunday, May 14, 2017 - link
That embecil Comey wanted to grab and be in the headlines, and he was manipulating evidence, etc ,and non-evidence, etc.to accomplish that. That's just one thing. He has no integrity. He showed himself to be just another Washington stooge. Hoover was also another Washington stooge and a degenerate, but was fired by the president that committed the crime that he fired Hoover for. If some entity could lob a couple of nukes onto Washington DC when whatever worthless miscreant president at the time is addressing both houses of congress, it would be a blessing!CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
The big difference is the Crucial M500 is MLC NAND and the Samsung 850 EVO and similar cheaper ones are TLC NAND. TLC is inherently slower than MLC; always. It's 2 bits per cell vs 3 bits per cell. It's an important distinction when comparing SLC, MLC, TLC and soon QLC. Maybe you didn't know?extide - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, but the 850 is also using #d TLC, not planar TLC, and 3D TLC is a lot faster than planar TLC. Maybe you didn't know?extide - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
#d is supposed to be 3D, of courselowlymarine - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
If only the very site you were on had some sort of database of benchmarks you could check to see that, in fact, the 850 EVO is massively faster than the M500. Oh hey, look what I found! http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/805?vs=1398MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 11, 2017 - link
The 850 Evo is faster though, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say