this is a bit of worrying trend where we are getting same products with new/updated firmware...the firmware that was essentially free earlier...and get improved performance...now they have to pay and buy new hardware for it.
Hard drive? They aren't that old, right? You do remember HDD firmware updates. As for SSDs, I've recently updated the firmware on my SSDs. Heck, even my monitor has been through a firmware update. Like the SSD updates, the monitor firmware affected performance and compatibility.
I used to worry about SSD firmware updates when I was getting in 1 every blue moon and it had novelty value but 200+ SSDs later I now just don't bother. At the end of the day getting an extra 30MBps just isnt the boost it was all those years ago.
I agree, the lack of SSD firmware updates - particularly what WD has pulled with the Black SSD's - is troubling. To artificially limit product improvement through restricting software updates and requiring the user to purchase an entirely new product sets a bad precedent. They could at least do what HP does in the server market and charge for support beyond the warranty. After a server warranty is up (typically 3 years) you have to pay for firmware and BIOS updates for servers. This isn't a terrible policy, at least it wasn't until meltdown\spectre hit and all the sudden it seemed somewhat necessary to update server firmware that were many years old.
Hard drives get firmware updates all the time - just not from the manufacturers. They typically applicable to retail products for reasons. But go ahead and look up a random OEM PC's drivers from Dell or HP and you might see various firmware updates available for the hard disk models those PC's shipped with.
Are they important though? Rarely. Barring any significant bug, hard disks have little to benefit from firmware updates as they are so mechanically limited and the controllers are generally quite mature, having been based on incremental generations of past firmware. This could all change as MAMR and HAMR become more mainstream, the same way the only hard disk firmware I remember being common were the WD Black2 (the SSD+HDD hybrid) and various Seagate SSHD's - for obvious reasons. The technology was new, and there are benefits to updating the SSD firmware as improvements are made through testing and customer feedback.
I think of it the other way around. Unless there’s a serious bug in the firmware, firmware upgrades are a gift, that manufacturers don’t have to give.
The fact is that even when they are available, almost no one applies them. That’s true even for most who know they’re available. It’s alwasys dangerous to upgrade firmware on a product so central to needs. If there’s an unfounded bug in the new upgrade, that could be worse than firmware that’s already working just fine, but isn’t quite as fast as you might wish foe.
I’ve never seen any major upgrade in performance from a drive firmware upgrade. Ever.
Most SSD vendors could produce 4TB double-sided M.2 drives using off the shelf parts. Putting 4TB on a single-sided module would require either going with a DRAMless controller, stacking DRAM and the controller on the same package, or using 1Tb+ QLC dies instead of TLC.
So currently any 4TB M.2 drive would have at least some significant downside that either compromises performance, restricts compatibility, or drives the price up well beyond twice that of a 2TB M.2 drive. There's simply not enough demand for such drives, and likely won't be anytime soon.
That drop in performance for a full drive in the Heavy - and even the Light!! - tests is worrying. They're right around the level of a SATA SSD.
My question is, how full is full? If you fill the drive up 99%, is its performance closer to empty or full? With all my SSDs, I typically leave about 10% of the drive unallocated (unpartitioned). How would the drive perform in this state?
I would be interested in seeing results for a drive that is almost full, but not quite full. I imagine that most people don't use their drives up until the final MB is used. Still, if a cost-conscious person is trying to get their money's worth, they might use the drive until it's 90-something percent full. Until recently, I was using a 512 GB SATA SSD with a real capacity of 476.8 GB. I used it until I was using 420 GB, at which point I upgraded to a 2 TB drive. So I was using 88% of its capacity. To me, that seems like a reasonable usage to test - not quite full, but almost full.
I would suspect that the reason for this might be thermal throttle issues. Throw a heat sink on there, and the performance downgrade might disappear. The versions with a pre-installed heatsink might be worth the money, depending on how much it would cost to buy a SSD heatsink at this point(I haven't looked).
Seems more likely to be reduction in the size of the SLC cache -- see the the filling the drive tests where there are 3 distinct phases depending on how much space is actually in use.
I also notice that these drives don't have an active power state less than 3.8W. That's unfortunate, because as Ganesh T S noted in his Anandtech review of the MyDigitalSSD M2X M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, that enclosure will only work with SSDs that have an active power state less than 3.8W.
I think this is important because it determines whether you can continue to use the SSD as a portable drive after you upgrade later. If you replace your 2 TB with a 4 or 8 TB SSD someday in the future, it will be nice to know that you can repurpose your 2 TB as an external drive.
Also, it determines whether you can easily upgrade your SSD when all your M.2 slots are full. Whenever I upgrade a SATA boot drive, I typically use an external USB enclosure to clone the current SATA drive (still installed internally) to the new SATA drive (inside the enclosure). Then I can swap the two drives, and my computer will transparently use the new drive. With M.2, this is even more important because many motherboards have only two M.2 sockets. So if you have both M.2 sockets filled and try to upgrade one of the M.2 drives, you'll have a bit of a challenge. You could buy a PCIe-M.2 card and use that, but using an external USB enclosure is more convenient.
So I'd like to see more M.2 drives with a sub-3.8 W active power state. The Samsung 970 EVO Plus has a 3.4 W active state, so it passes this test.
My reviews are intended to advise consumers who are buying SSDs to increase their productivity, not people who are trying to set a high score on Crystal Disk Mark.
People who care about real-world productivity rather than CDM scores should recognize that imperceptible improvements to peak performance are probably not worth the sacrifice of significant regressions in performance on niche heavy workloads. For a lot of users, both SM2262 and SM2262EN drives are fast enough. Beyond those lighter use cases, I think it will be more common to find the SM2262EN coming up short in a meaningful way than to find it providing a tangible performance advantage over SM2262.
I can't help wondering how some of the old favourites would behave in these comparisons, the 950 EVO/Pro, 960s, etc. Have things really moved on that much?
It's not about crystal disk mark score. It's about almost no one of the everyday user, playing games, surfing the web and using microsoft office, will come near your "light" test, let alone "heavy" or "torture".
Most of them need high random reads for their computer to feel snappy and responsive, and a big enough a slc cache to accommodate a full bluray of writes.
"Most of them need high random reads for their computer to feel snappy and responsive,"
They already have that. Further increases to random read performance won't make the system feel any more responsive during light workloads, as demonstrated by SYSmark. High-end NVMe SSDs are already way past the point of diminishing returns for peak random read speeds, especially for lighter workloads where a few GB of DRAM used by the OS for caching is enough to almost completely decouple storage performance from application responsiveness.
So, you're saying that optane doesn't feel more responsive to you, or that the high random reads of optane isn't responsible for feeling more responsive than a high end nvme ssd ?
Grabbed an MX500 500GB at Christmas. It's half the price of those tested here, and uses up a spare SATA. Hardly the fastest SSD in the world, but for most purposes it's hard to tell the difference.
They do seem to be well priced, though I bagged several barely used 850 Pro 512GB units for about the same cost, people seem to be selling them for silly money these days, grud knows why. The 840 Pro is also still very good, one of the most reliable SATA SSDs ever made.
CPU, GPU and DRAM vendors can in theory sample chips that will overclock better than the average retail item, but there's no easy way for SSD vendors to cheat on performance with careful sampling. And the number of drives that don't survive my testing strongly suggests that they aren't doing any sort of extra QA before sending samples to me.
These drives are mostly of interest to people who need odd sized drives. For example, if you need a 600GB drive, you probably have to buy a 1TB drive and only use 600GB of it. Either of the 1TB drives should perform reasonably in this scenario. You might still have to tweak the power saving settings to avoid putting the drive to sleep too frequently (due to the huge wakeup time), but the active idle power is less that one watt.
For me , anything over 500Gb is going to be used for mass storage, so HDD rulez. But ssd would be better on speed, noise and (possibly) reliability. I dont need ultra speeds, just something cheap enough, and faster than HDD. A long way off, still . Why couldn't ADATA offer two versions of the drive, or at least two firmwares, one for Boy racers, one for commercial use? if you can get a chandelier on your ram sticks ....well?
How full is full? 100%? And is there a noticeable cliff in the performance, or is there a general decline? Or both (gradual decline in performance until the drives are filled to some threshold amount, after which the performance drops off a cliff)? If we were to leave enough space empty on the drive, could we avoid this hypothetical cliff?
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42 Comments
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wolfesteinabhi - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
this is a bit of worrying trend where we are getting same products with new/updated firmware...the firmware that was essentially free earlier...and get improved performance...now they have to pay and buy new hardware for it.ERJ - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
When is the last time you updated the firmware on your hard drive? RAID card / BIOS / Video Card sure, but hard drive?Now, you could argue that the controller is essentially part of the hard drive in this case but still.
jeremyshaw - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Hard drive? They aren't that old, right? You do remember HDD firmware updates. As for SSDs, I've recently updated the firmware on my SSDs. Heck, even my monitor has been through a firmware update. Like the SSD updates, the monitor firmware affected performance and compatibility.jabber - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I used to worry about SSD firmware updates when I was getting in 1 every blue moon and it had novelty value but 200+ SSDs later I now just don't bother. At the end of the day getting an extra 30MBps just isnt the boost it was all those years ago.ridic987 - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
We are discussing SSD's not hard drive. Literally the thing what he is saying most applies to.Samus - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I agree, the lack of SSD firmware updates - particularly what WD has pulled with the Black SSD's - is troubling. To artificially limit product improvement through restricting software updates and requiring the user to purchase an entirely new product sets a bad precedent. They could at least do what HP does in the server market and charge for support beyond the warranty. After a server warranty is up (typically 3 years) you have to pay for firmware and BIOS updates for servers. This isn't a terrible policy, at least it wasn't until meltdown\spectre hit and all the sudden it seemed somewhat necessary to update server firmware that were many years old.Hard drives get firmware updates all the time - just not from the manufacturers. They typically applicable to retail products for reasons. But go ahead and look up a random OEM PC's drivers from Dell or HP and you might see various firmware updates available for the hard disk models those PC's shipped with.
Are they important though? Rarely. Barring any significant bug, hard disks have little to benefit from firmware updates as they are so mechanically limited and the controllers are generally quite mature, having been based on incremental generations of past firmware. This could all change as MAMR and HAMR become more mainstream, the same way the only hard disk firmware I remember being common were the WD Black2 (the SSD+HDD hybrid) and various Seagate SSHD's - for obvious reasons. The technology was new, and there are benefits to updating the SSD firmware as improvements are made through testing and customer feedback.
melgross - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I think of it the other way around. Unless there’s a serious bug in the firmware, firmware upgrades are a gift, that manufacturers don’t have to give.The fact is that even when they are available, almost no one applies them. That’s true even for most who know they’re available. It’s alwasys dangerous to upgrade firmware on a product so central to needs. If there’s an unfounded bug in the new upgrade, that could be worse than firmware that’s already working just fine, but isn’t quite as fast as you might wish foe.
I’ve never seen any major upgrade in performance from a drive firmware upgrade. Ever.
FullmetalTitan - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Those of us around for sandforce controllers remember well the pains of updating SSD firmware to make our drives useableDigitalFreak - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Billy - how far are we away from having 4TB M.2 NVMe drives?Billy Tallis - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Most SSD vendors could produce 4TB double-sided M.2 drives using off the shelf parts. Putting 4TB on a single-sided module would require either going with a DRAMless controller, stacking DRAM and the controller on the same package, or using 1Tb+ QLC dies instead of TLC.So currently any 4TB M.2 drive would have at least some significant downside that either compromises performance, restricts compatibility, or drives the price up well beyond twice that of a 2TB M.2 drive. There's simply not enough demand for such drives, and likely won't be anytime soon.
Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
That drop in performance for a full drive in the Heavy - and even the Light!! - tests is worrying. They're right around the level of a SATA SSD.My question is, how full is full? If you fill the drive up 99%, is its performance closer to empty or full? With all my SSDs, I typically leave about 10% of the drive unallocated (unpartitioned). How would the drive perform in this state?
I would be interested in seeing results for a drive that is almost full, but not quite full. I imagine that most people don't use their drives up until the final MB is used. Still, if a cost-conscious person is trying to get their money's worth, they might use the drive until it's 90-something percent full. Until recently, I was using a 512 GB SATA SSD with a real capacity of 476.8 GB. I used it until I was using 420 GB, at which point I upgraded to a 2 TB drive. So I was using 88% of its capacity. To me, that seems like a reasonable usage to test - not quite full, but almost full.
Targon - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
I would suspect that the reason for this might be thermal throttle issues. Throw a heat sink on there, and the performance downgrade might disappear. The versions with a pre-installed heatsink might be worth the money, depending on how much it would cost to buy a SSD heatsink at this point(I haven't looked).BillyONeal - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Seems more likely to be reduction in the size of the SLC cache -- see the the filling the drive tests where there are 3 distinct phases depending on how much space is actually in use.jabber - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I must admit I still leave a few GB spare/unallocated on any SSD I install. 2GB on a 120GB, 4GB on a 240GB and 8GB on a 500GB. Old habits.reactor_au - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
I was wondering the same thing, how full can one get before performance drops off the cliff like in the benchmarks? Its a very import detail to omit!Luckz - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
At 80% full it was really tragic in this review of the 256GB size https://pclab.pl/art79361-9.htmlMikewind Dale - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
I also notice that these drives don't have an active power state less than 3.8W. That's unfortunate, because as Ganesh T S noted in his Anandtech review of the MyDigitalSSD M2X M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, that enclosure will only work with SSDs that have an active power state less than 3.8W.I think this is important because it determines whether you can continue to use the SSD as a portable drive after you upgrade later. If you replace your 2 TB with a 4 or 8 TB SSD someday in the future, it will be nice to know that you can repurpose your 2 TB as an external drive.
Also, it determines whether you can easily upgrade your SSD when all your M.2 slots are full. Whenever I upgrade a SATA boot drive, I typically use an external USB enclosure to clone the current SATA drive (still installed internally) to the new SATA drive (inside the enclosure). Then I can swap the two drives, and my computer will transparently use the new drive. With M.2, this is even more important because many motherboards have only two M.2 sockets. So if you have both M.2 sockets filled and try to upgrade one of the M.2 drives, you'll have a bit of a challenge. You could buy a PCIe-M.2 card and use that, but using an external USB enclosure is more convenient.
So I'd like to see more M.2 drives with a sub-3.8 W active power state. The Samsung 970 EVO Plus has a 3.4 W active state, so it passes this test.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
I love ADATA's naming scheme! It's so easily memorable and has more X's than any other brand.eddieobscurant - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Nice review , as always although I disagree with your conclusion. Peak performance is what most people want.Billy Tallis - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
My reviews are intended to advise consumers who are buying SSDs to increase their productivity, not people who are trying to set a high score on Crystal Disk Mark.People who care about real-world productivity rather than CDM scores should recognize that imperceptible improvements to peak performance are probably not worth the sacrifice of significant regressions in performance on niche heavy workloads. For a lot of users, both SM2262 and SM2262EN drives are fast enough. Beyond those lighter use cases, I think it will be more common to find the SM2262EN coming up short in a meaningful way than to find it providing a tangible performance advantage over SM2262.
mapesdhs - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I can't help wondering how some of the old favourites would behave in these comparisons, the 950 EVO/Pro, 960s, etc. Have things really moved on that much?Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
We have at least partial test results in Bench for most of the old drives that aren't worth including in every review: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2219?vs=23...eddieobscurant - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It's not about crystal disk mark score. It's about almost no one of the everyday user, playing games, surfing the web and using microsoft office, will come near your "light" test, let alone "heavy" or "torture".Most of them need high random reads for their computer to feel snappy and responsive, and a big enough a slc cache to accommodate a full bluray of writes.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
"Most of them need high random reads for their computer to feel snappy and responsive,"They already have that. Further increases to random read performance won't make the system feel any more responsive during light workloads, as demonstrated by SYSmark. High-end NVMe SSDs are already way past the point of diminishing returns for peak random read speeds, especially for lighter workloads where a few GB of DRAM used by the OS for caching is enough to almost completely decouple storage performance from application responsiveness.
eddieobscurant - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
So, you're saying that optane doesn't feel more responsive to you, or that the high random reads of optane isn't responsible for feeling more responsive than a high end nvme ssd ?Dark_wizzie - Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - link
Why does perf drop on 2tb model?Dark_wizzie - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
For low qd random reads, sorry.Dark_wizzie - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
And... serves me right for commenting before finishing the last page of the article. >.>oh well.
GreenReaper - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Grabbed an MX500 500GB at Christmas. It's half the price of those tested here, and uses up a spare SATA. Hardly the fastest SSD in the world, but for most purposes it's hard to tell the difference.mapesdhs - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
They do seem to be well priced, though I bagged several barely used 850 Pro 512GB units for about the same cost, people seem to be selling them for silly money these days, grud knows why. The 840 Pro is also still very good, one of the most reliable SATA SSDs ever made.cassiohui - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Hi Billy, just wondering, why is the 970 pro not in the graphs when even the 900p is?Death666Angel - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
They have stated on Twitter and in the comments before that they did not receive a 970 Pro review sample.cassiohui - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
960 pro maybe?mapesdhs - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Pity they don't just buy them in themselves to do the tests anyway. I'd put more faith in data thathasn't come from free samples. :)
Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
CPU, GPU and DRAM vendors can in theory sample chips that will overclock better than the average retail item, but there's no easy way for SSD vendors to cheat on performance with careful sampling. And the number of drives that don't survive my testing strongly suggests that they aren't doing any sort of extra QA before sending samples to me.jahid - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Thanks for your valuable writing. HP some model availble in https://www.startech.com.bd/component/SSD-Hard-Dis...ballsystemlord - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Well, I will not be purchasing an EX950. That is for sure. I'm bound to run the SLC down quite a bit and then performance will tank.KAlmquist - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
These drives are mostly of interest to people who need odd sized drives. For example, if you need a 600GB drive, you probably have to buy a 1TB drive and only use 600GB of it. Either of the 1TB drives should perform reasonably in this scenario. You might still have to tweak the power saving settings to avoid putting the drive to sleep too frequently (due to the huge wakeup time), but the active idle power is less that one watt.dromoxen - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
For me , anything over 500Gb is going to be used for mass storage, so HDD rulez. But ssd would be better on speed, noise and (possibly) reliability. I dont need ultra speeds, just something cheap enough, and faster than HDD. A long way off, still .Why couldn't ADATA offer two versions of the drive, or at least two firmwares, one for Boy racers, one for commercial use? if you can get a chandelier on your ram sticks ....well?
upvts - Monday, July 29, 2019 - link
How full is full? 100%? And is there a noticeable cliff in the performance, or is there a general decline? Or both (gradual decline in performance until the drives are filled to some threshold amount, after which the performance drops off a cliff)? If we were to leave enough space empty on the drive, could we avoid this hypothetical cliff?mrdigdug - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Just receive an Adata sx8200 pro 512G today, and it uses SM2262 controller instead (SM2262G AB). Very disappointed in Adata!