Previewing Silicon Motion SM2260 NVMe Controller With 3D MLC NAND (512GB)
by Billy Tallis on February 17, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.
The SM2260 sample's average data rate on the Light test once again puts it as the slowest NVMe SSD using MLC NAND, but also still faster than SATA SSDs and the Intel SSD 600p. Even Samsung's smallest 250GB 960 EVO substantially outperforms the SM2260 sample.
The average service times of the SM2260 sample put it near the bottom of its class of NVMe SSDs, but this metric also shows a wide lead over SATA SSDs.
The SM2260 sample is not in the top tier of NVMe SSDs for its ability to keep latency low, but the number of outliers above 10ms is slightly better than the OCZ RD400 and far better than SATA SSDs and the Intel 600p.
The SM2260 is essentially tied for last place in power efficiency, using only slightly less energy than the Patriot Hellfire and the Plextor M8Pe.
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romrunning - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
You would have thought their design performance target would have been the older 950 Pro (not the newer 960 line) or the even-older Intel 750 . But no, it seems they are competing with Phison for the lowest-performing NVMe SSD award. Disappointing - just like that Intel 600p.ddriver - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
First look: slow. Second look: still slow. It is quite the feat they manage to make an nvme controller almost as slow as sata.jjj - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Guess it's a sub 200$ drive, we'll see how it does against WD's offering and Plextor M8Se.Not worth wasting the M.2 slot on such a drive, unless it's well bellow 200$. Right now on Newegg, the M8Pe without a shield is 220$.
kissiel - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Isn't the Z97Pro bottlenecking the drive?AFAIK it's pcie2.0 x 2 - > so sub 1GiB/s tops.
revanchrist - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
True that. It's a 10Gbps M.2 rather than the newer 32Gbps M.2 slot.fanofanand - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Nice catch! Strange for one of the top tech sites in the world to use old tech to test new tech. Very strange indeed. Ryan? Can you squeeze Purch to get some current equipment into your reviewer's hands?DanNeely - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
I don't think so. The last page of the article shows the card in a x4 PCIe adapter. AFAIK that's plugged into 3.0 lanes from the CPU both for performance testing and to monitor the power draw.Billy Tallis - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Exactly right. All PCIe SSDs are tested in the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot with a riser card that has the power measurement points on it. Although, I did also test the Intel 600p in the motherboard's M.2 slot to see how much the slowest NVMe drive would be affected.kissiel - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
Thanks!Please consider pointing that out in a test bed info next time, so people will know what to expect with a similar combo (z97+m.2).
Keep up, the good work!
TelstarTOS - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Another piece of crap. This controller should be trashed away.