PCIe SSD Faceoff: Samsung XP941 (128GB & 256GB) and OCZ RevoDrive 350 (480GB) Tested
by Kristian Vättö on September 5, 2014 3:00 PM ESTPerformance vs. Transfer Size
ATTO is a useful tool for quickly benchmarking performance across various transfer sizes. You can get the complete data set in Bench. The ATTO graphs highlight the biggest issue the RevoDrive has. At small transfer sizes the performance is substantially lower than what SATA drives offer and it is only at 128KB where the RevoDrive starts to benefit from PCIe and RAID. It does close to 2GB/s with 8MB transfer size but for users that figure is fairly meaningless because IOs that large are rare.
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Intervenator - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
Need MOAR insight into the PCIe SSD market! Wheres it going? Any noticeable performance increased to the end user? Who are the players in the market? Non performance advantages?If AnandTech has already written an article regarding any of this, could someone please point me towards it?
Intervenator - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
Oh, and great review.Kristian Vättö - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
We haven't done an article that collects all bits of info into one, but you may find the following articles interesting:http://www.anandtech.com/show/8006/samsung-ssd-xp9...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/testing-sata-ex...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7520/lsi-announces-s...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8147/the-intel-ssd-d...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8104/intel-ssd-dc-p3...
frenchy_2001 - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
>Where is it going?M.2 form factor using PCIe gen3 x4 for portable and consumer, PCIe cards, up to Gen3 x8 for Datacenter/server. Both running NVMe protocol.
I don't see much future for SATAexpress, as the 2 other competing standards cover all the use cases already (and better too).
> Any noticeable performance increased to the end user?
Not unless you do a LOT of parallel IOs. For consumer, there is a diminutive return past the original boost from switching to SSD (mostly from lower latencies). HDD to SATA SSD gave orders of magnitude improvements. SATA3 -> PCIe is only incremental compared to that. Unless you need this for a server, video processing or other big IO limited task, there will be little difference.
>Who are the players in the market?
Still the same: Intel/Micron/Samsung/Sandisk for professionals/servers using mostly in-house designs (intel P3700 for example).
Marvel and Sandforce have announced PCIe NVMe controllers. No products for those yet.
>Non performance advantages?
M.2 will be more compact. Power draw should be more optimized. NVMe should have lower processor overhead.
Impulses - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
Thx for that.iwod - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link
Since speed is a relative thing. The HDD to SSD leap were amazing. But that doesn't mean you cant feel the different between SSD @ SATA 3GBps and SSD@ 6Gbps. And with the recent controller improvement on Random / Seq RW, I can also feel the difference between SATA and NVMe PCIe SSD.But with the increase memory capacity, the time to fetch things SSD will also be lower since they are likely cached. So throughput may become less of a concern after PCIe SSD, and average response time will play a role. Luckily this is already being worked on for server SSD usage. So they will likly filter down once PCIe SSD becomes mainstream.
For the future I would like to see even lower active power consumption. I wonder if they could get it under 2W.
Friendly0Fire - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
This makes me think that the SM951 with X99 will be one hell of a beast... I want one. Heck, the XP941 would already be amazing.GrigioR - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
Is it possible to boot from those PCIe drives using a 775 motherboard (p35chipset)? Getting rid of Satall bottleneck would be awesome on my modded Xeon system.Kristian Vättö - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link
The SM951 likely won't be bootable since it is an OEM drive, but there will be retail PCIe SSDs that are bootable even in older systems (the Plextor M6e should be, for instance).GrigioR - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link
Nice. Too pricey 1$/GB on the 256GB model... Since my motherboard is PCIe 1.0/1.1 it would run at 500MB/s max... That should not be that noticieable. My Samsung 840 120/128GB runs at +- 250-260MB/s (read)... At least if it were a PCIe x4 it would do 1000MB (bus speed). I`ll leave this the way it is for now. Thank you very much for your input. Now i know it is possible.