The Intel 660p 512GB drive should have been included as well...
Unfortunately, I don't have one. But, the P1 is very close in performance - so close it is almost a substitute if you want to see how the 660p 512GB may perform.
The performance doesn't look particularly good, generally being at the bottom of the barrel among the NVMe drives, and even seeing a 23% longer load time than the SATA-based MX500 at the Final Fantasy test. If it's 23% slower than a SATA drive at actually loading things, and 30% slower than the previous P1 model, then what's the point? Higher sequential transfers in some synthetic benchmarks and file copy tests don't mean much if it's going to perform worse at common real-world operations. I certainly wouldn't say that the drive "beats SATA dollar for dollar" or "delivers SATA-breaking speed, even without DRAM" based on those results.
The indications that QLC flash may be replacing the drive's TLC in a future revision also means the P2 might perform substantially worse than the results shown here, so I hope to see some follow up testing if that ends up being the case. The review says the BX500 did that, and mentions "keeping us up to date" about it, but if I search for BX500 reviews, including the one from Tom's Hardware, they all appear to describe the drive as using TLC and performing better than the drive's specifications would indicate, and no update appears to have been made about the switch to QLC. Sending out faster TLC drives for review, then releasing versions with QLC under the same product name at a later date seems rather shifty.
Updates I am referring to typically come in news posts or if I am sampled the updated device, it will be reflected in an update in the review. I wasn't aware of the BX500 QLC swap until recently, the week of writing this review, and actually haven't had a moment to notify the team about it until the other day, tho I think I saw a post about it somewhere at one point.
As far as a "responsive user experience" goes, something tells me that these differences of a few millionths of a second are not going to be perceptible. The difference in latency between the fastest and slowest SSD tested here only amounts to around one ten-thousandth of a second, so I don't see how anyone would notice that when it will take a typical monitor around a hundred times as long to update the image to display the output. Maybe a bunch of these operations added together could make some difference, but then more of the drive's performance characteristics will come into play than just latency, so I don't see how that synthetic benchmark would bear much direct relation to the actual real-world experience. It's fine to show those latency benchmark results, but I don't think direct relations to the user experience can really be drawn from them.
After toying with hundreds of SSDs, for me, I notice the difference in responsiveness between SATA and PCIe SSDs in day to day use. It's slight but noticeable, and especially so when launching apps after boot and moving a bunch of files around. You may not be able to draw conclusions by only looking at synthetic, but that doesn't mean one can't.
The iometer and ATTO synthetic data are just a few of the data points I look at when analyzing performance. But, there are some relationships/patterns in these data points metrics that carry over to real-world performance. After analyzing the strengths and weaknesses between many SSDs architectures and performance scores and operation habits in the same system, one can start linking synthetic differences between devices to real-world experience differences between devices. As well, these results are included to validate manufacturer performance ratings. Real-world benchmarks can not do that, which is why I include them as supporting evidence to complement the real-world data.
I'd like to see more real-world load time results in these reviews, as that's what these drives will typically be getting used for most of the time. As the Final Fantasy test shows, just because one drive appears multiple times as fast in some synthetic benchmarks or file copy tests, that doesn't necessarily translate to better performance at actually loading things. Practically all of the synthetic benchmarks show the P2 being substantially faster than an MX500 SATA drive, but when it comes to loading a game's files, it ends up being noticeably slower by a few seconds. Is that result a fluke, or are these synthetic tests really that out-of-touch with the drive's real-world performance? These reviews should measure other load times of common applications, games and so on, and not just rely primarily on pre-canned and synthetic benchmarks that seem to be at odds with the one real-world loading test.
The only synthetic tests that I use are iometer and ATTO. PCMark 10 and SPECworkstation three are trace-based that test the SSD directly against multiple real-world workloads that cater to their respective consumer and prosumer market segments.
Final fantasy shows just a second or two difference because of a few reasons. Most SSDs are similarly responsive to this one workload simply because it isn't a demanding one, it is a rather light read test really. Overall, the game data loading process is so well optimized for HDD usage that when you replace the HDD with the SSD, most will load the few hundred GB of data per game scene at relatively the same time since its such a small transfer.
The fastest SSDs can respond faster to the random and sequential requests than others due to lower read request latency, and thus they rank ahead of slower ones here - those few hundredths of an ms add up to show that difference. Ideally, I need a larger, more graphically demanding game benchmark, a better GPU, and a 4K monitor to get a larger performance delta between drives. Different resolution settings and games will perform differently. I use Final Fantasy's benchmark because it is the only one I know of that saves load time data. I hope more devs could include load times in their game benchmarks. If you have any recommendations, I'm all ears!
Also, I'd like to see test results for drives that are mostly full. Does the real-world performance tank if the drive is 75% or 90% full, and less space is dedicated to the SLC cache? These benchmark results don't really provide any good indication of that. The graphs showing how much performance drops once the cache is filled are nice, but the size of that cache will typically change as the drive is filled. A mostly-full drive may only have a handful of gigabytes of cache that gets filled even with moderately-sized write operations.
Ah yes, more write cache testing, my favorite! I could do more and it would be cool to include, but it is not worth doing so at this time. Most dynamic SLC write caches will shrink at a higher full rate, but most perform well still. I perform all my testing on SSDs that are running the current OS and 50% full as it is (except the write cache testing is done empty after a secure erase when possible). Most of the time, even though the cache shrinks, it's still as responsive as when the drive was empty, the write cache is smaller in size so only larger transfers will be impacted.
A "few MB" is kind of vague. How much system RAM is it actually using? The Crucual P1 had 1GB of DRAM onboard for each 1TB of storage capacity. If the P2 is using 1GB of system RAM for the same purpose, then that's a hidden cost not reflected by the price of the drive itself. This might be especially relevant if one were adding such a drive to a system with just 8GB of RAM. And even on a system with 16GB, that could become more of a concern within a few years as RAM requirements rise for things like games. If one ends up needing to upgrade their RAM sooner due to DRAMless drives consuming a chunk of it, then the cost savings of cutting that out of the drive itself seems questionable, especially given the effects on performance.
Unfortunately, I do not have tools that tell me exactly how much each drive utilizes and manufacturers will not disclose specifics all the time...well I might have a tool, but I haven't been able to explore using it quite yet. From the drive's I have tested with HMB and had the RAM usage disclosed to me, it has been set to around 32-128MB. However, based on some discussion with a friend, we think it could be up to 2GB-4GB based on the spec's data
And for that matter, it seems like the performance of system RAM could affect test results more than it does on drives with their own onboard RAM. I'm curious whether running system RAM at a lower speed, or perhaps on a Ryzen system with different memory latency characteristics could affect the standings for these DRAMless drives. The use of system RAM also undoubtedly affects the power test results as well. This drive appears to be among the most efficient models, but is the system RAM seeing higher power draw during file operations in its place?
All testing is currently on an Asus X570 Crosshair VIIIHero (Wifi) + Ryzen R5 3600X @4.2 all core platform with a kit of 3600MHz CL18 DDR4. I actually have that suspicion myself and have been planning to get a faster kit of RAM to test out how it influences both DRAMless and DRAM-based SSD performance, too.
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