News Crucial Releases Its Fastest SSD Ever in the P5

[Admin]

Crucial has announced the P5 M.2 NVMe SSD family, which features its fastest drive to .

Crucial Releases Its Fastest SSD Ever in the P5 : Read more

 

[DZIrl]

Yeah, every NVMe SSD has very nice read/write speeds in benchmarks but when comes to real world than story becomes different.
I have Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and ADATA 8200 Pro 2TB and besides both have nice numbers 970 is faster

 

[bit_user]

every NVMe SSD has very nice read/write speeds in benchmarks

No, some are bad even in benchmarks.

 

[bit_user]

I hope this elevates Crucial's NVMe portfolio to include the value-performance "sweet spot" long occupied by their MX-series SATA drives (and the M550, before that).

It's a shame they didn't post any random IOPS. Even though such numbers are always at unrealistically high QD, it'd still be something more to go on than just the sequential numbers.

 

[Makaveli]

Yeah, every NVMe SSD has very nice read/write speeds in benchmarks but when comes to real world than story becomes different.
I have Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and ADATA 8200 Pro 2TB and besides both have nice numbers 970 is faster

All depends on workflow and what you do with I/O on your pc.

 

[mdd1963]

Numbers similar with 960/970...

Now make it $30-$40 cheaper....and they will come!

 

[AlistairAB]

Yeah, every NVMe SSD has very nice read/write speeds in benchmarks but when comes to real world than story becomes different.
I have Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and ADATA 8200 Pro 2TB and besides both have nice numbers 970 is faster

I have many workloads where the SX 8200 Pro is faster. Depends on what you are doing. SX8200 Pro is the best value high speed drive. 970 Pro is just a huge waste of money.

 

[derekullo]

I have many workloads where the SX 8200 Pro is faster. Depends on what you are doing. SX8200 Pro is the best value high speed drive. 970 Pro is just a huge waste of money.

The 970 Pro has extremely consistent sequential write speed.

Pretty much a solid red line from 0% to 100%

Depending on the intended use this could be highly advantageous (write cache) or irrelevant (gaming)

 

[kaalus]

SSD speeds have little effect on OS responsiveness on Windows. Windows Defender (the always-on antivirus) is completely killing the performance of the I/O operations. For example, on my 970 Evo 1TB NVME, I can delete files at about 50 per second, copy small files not much faster. This is absolutely laughable - if the SSD was not saddled by the anti-virus, it would be deleting and copying them at 10,000s if not 100,000s per second.
Of course, everything's fine if copying a few huge files. Gigabytes per second. But that's a niche situation.

 

[Deicidium369]

No, some are bad even in benchmarks.

the WORST SSD is better than the best spinning rust.

 

[Deicidium369]

SSD speeds have little effect on OS responsiveness on Windows. Windows Defender (the always-on antivirus) is completely killing the performance of the I/O operations. For example, on my 970 Evo 1TB NVME, I can delete files at about 50 per second, copy small files not much faster. This is absolutely laughable - if the SSD was not saddled by the anti-virus, it would be deleting and copying them at 10,000s if not 100,000s per second.
Of course, everything's fine if copying a few huge files. Gigabytes per second. But that's a niche situation.

Wow you use Defender? I run Kaspersky Internet Security + Malwarebytes and they have zero impact on performance. You have something messed up - I have the same 970 Evo that you have - and have NONE of the performance issues you have.

 

[Deicidium369]

Numbers similar with 960/970...

Now make it $30-$40 cheaper....and they will come!

The Samsung drives are priced quite fairly and even at $30 to $40 cheaper - most with a clue would still get the Samsung. IF you say this drive is as fast as the Samsung, why in a world that contains Samsung, would you buy this other drive?

 

[bit_user]

The 970 Pro has extremely consistent sequential write speed.

Pretty much a solid red line from 0% to 100%

Thanks for that, but how many people need to copy 1 TB at a time? Great for drive imaging of another fast NVMe drive, but that's like the only use case I can think of...

With the 970 EVO, you get maybe 50 GB of full speed writes and then it drops to 50% speed. That would be fine with me.

Most other drives cut out way too quickly, then performance really tanks. The 600p is great for a laugh - it's best speed is like 50% of the 970 EVO's worst. And its worst speed is even slower than a HDD!

 

[bit_user]

the WORST SSD is better than the best spinning rust.

We weren't talking about that, but there are a few cases where even that isn't true.

Some of the early DRAM-less SSDs were down within HDD-level realm of performance, and the performance data @derekullo just posted shows that Intel's 600p NVMe drive drops below HDDs if sequential writes carry on for long enough.

 

[bit_user]

on my 970 Evo 1TB NVME, I can delete files at about 50 per second, copy small files not much faster. This is absolutely laughable - if the SSD was not saddled by the anti-virus, it would be deleting and copying them at 10,000s if not 100,000s per second.

Let's think about this. I'm pretty sure deleting files is a sequential operation, which means we're looking at QD=1 performance. Deleting each file is going to involve updating directory metadata and filesystem data structures. So, that's a few I/O operations. If you're using a journaling filesystem, add another for writing the journal. So, let's use a round number of 5 I/O ops per file.

Next, let's look at what the 970 Evo can manage, in 4 kB random write IOPS at QD1 - 44,456, according to this:

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-970-evo-ssd-review,5573-2.html

So, with those assumptions, we get 8891 files/sec. Now, add some overhead for system calls, etc. and I think an achievable number is probably down in the realm of 5k files/sec.

Also, I almost forgot: TRIM adds overhead. If the OS is doing one TRIM call per file, that will be significant. On Linux, the norm is periodically TRIM the entire filesystem, rather than doing a TRIM call for every time blocks are deallocated.

Of course, everything's fine if copying a few huge files. Gigabytes per second. But that's a niche situation.

Okay, then maybe scratch what I said about TRIM.

However, without TRIM, time to delete a file usually increases as a logarithmic function of its size. So, it's normal for large deletions to be that fast, even on much slower devices. However, it does vary between filesystems.

 

[alextheblue]

SSD speeds have little effect on OS responsiveness on Windows. Windows Defender (the always-on antivirus) is completely killing the performance of the I/O operations. For example, on my 970 Evo 1TB NVME, I can delete files at about 50 per second, copy small files not much faster. This is absolutely laughable - if the SSD was not saddled by the anti-virus, it would be deleting and copying them at 10,000s if not 100,000s per second.
Of course, everything's fine if copying a few huge files. Gigabytes per second. But that's a niche situation.

I'm not so sure it's just your AV. Might be security microcode too for example, depending on your CPU.

 

[bit_user]

I'm not so sure it's just your AV. Might be security microcode too for example, depending on your CPU.

Yeah, what I said about syscall overhead will be much worse with security mitigations. I forgot to account for that.

 

[derekullo]

Thanks for that, but how many people need to copy 1 TB at a time? Great for drive imaging of another fast NVMe drive, but that's like the only use case I can think of...

With the 970 EVO, you get maybe 50 GB of full speed writes and then it drops to 50% speed. That would be fine with me.

Most other drives cut out way too quickly, then performance really tanks. The 600p is great for a laugh - it's best speed is like 50% of the 970 EVO's worst. And its worst speed is even slower than a HDD!

I agree the 970 Pro is overkill for most people that are not in a write heavy environment.

Continuous heavy write performance is the only real advantage the Pro has over the Evo.

An example of this would be using the drive as a ZIL / write cache in a ZFS system.

At work we have a Tegile hybrid flash array, based on ZFS, with something like 100 terabytes in hard drives and 20 terabytes of flash spread across read, write and metadata caches.

Do note that the SSDs Tegile uses may not be Samsung 970 Pros, but they could very well be.

The Tegile SSDs we use are 500 gigabytes, which is a size the Samsung 970 Pro comes in.

The storage Tegile provides supports 100s of VMware and HyperV virtual machines that we use.

To reiterate this is a niche product but it isn't "a huge waste of money".

 

[bit_user]

Do note that the SSDs Tegile uses may not be Samsung 970 Pros, but they could very well be.

No, probably not. In spite of its name, Samsung's "Pro" drives are not their enterprise product line, which likely has some features not found in their consumer models.

Samsung seems to be very secretive about their enterprise line of SSDs, perhaps to keep it from competing with their consumer models. I think you need an approved reseller or partner login to be able to access any info about them.

 

[AlistairAB]

The 970 Pro has extremely consistent sequential write speed.

Pretty much a solid red line from 0% to 100%

Depending on the intended use this could be highly advantageous (write cache) or irrelevant (gaming)

Nothing you posted there has anything to do with what I said? I said the SX 8200 Pro is faster in some workloads, you posted a picture without the SX8200 Pro. Go look up the SX8200 Pro review on Tweaktown.

 

[DZIrl]

Nothing you posted there has anything to do with what I said? I said the SX 8200 Pro is faster in some workloads, you posted a picture without the SX8200 Pro. Go look up the SX8200 Pro review on Tweaktown.

I have 970Pro 1TB and 8200Pro 2TB. In random ops 970 is faster but in big files 8200 is. For sure 8200 is twice capacity and as such should perform more ops in parallel. But my tests are under question cause I'm using x570 MB. 970 is directly on CPU but 8200 is on chipset. Not sure how much 8200 is affected by this.
Does anyone knows this?
For example, SSD is PCI3, chipset uses PCI4. Is complete chipset downgraded to PCI3 or not?

Real test results (copy 8GB single file):
970 -> 8200: 2.5 GBs flat begin to end
8200 -> 970: 1.9 GBs flat begin to end

Samsung Magician benchmark:

	970​	8200​
Seq Read	3506	3171 MB/s
Seq Write	2719	2450 MB/s
Random IOPS rd	354980	352050
Random IOPS wr	272216	278320

Both drives cca 60% full but 970 is system drive (Win, swap, etc). BTW performance on both drives degraded a bit in last 5 months. Eg 8200 3201 -> 3171. Second run was also a bit different.
So, real test is opposite to benchmark.

 

[bit_user]

For example, SSD is PCI3, chipset uses PCI4. Is complete chipset downgraded to PCI3 or not?

Generally speaking, other slots should be unaffected, other than width or whether they're enabled at all. But speed should be negotiated on a per-device basis.

 

[derekullo]

Nothing you posted there has anything to do with what I said? I said the SX 8200 Pro is faster in some workloads, you posted a picture without the SX8200 Pro. Go look up the SX8200 Pro review on Tweaktown.

You said the 970 Pro was "a huge waste of money".

I provided evidence that under write heavy situations the 970 Pro is not a waste of money.

That sounds like a direct contradiction to what you said.

The SX 8200 Pro can't sustain 2800ish megabytes a second of sequential writes for more than 50 gigabytes.

I assumed you already knew the write characteristics of the SX 8200 Pro, as you are so keen in directing me to Tweaktown's review, that I did not link the graph showing this information in my last post and simply linked the 970 Pro review page.

If you are indeed aware of the SX8200 Pro write characteristics then it is not that difficult to picture a solid black line going across the page and a red line that looks like three badly made steps.

On that note be sure to pay close attention to the black line and the red line steps in the following graph.

 

[bit_user]

You said the 970 Pro was "a huge waste of money".

I provided evidence that under write heavy situations the 970 Pro is not a waste of money.

I think you showed that the 970 Pro can be justified in extreme scenarios, but what you posted actually convinced me that the 970 Evo was entirely equivalent, for the vast majority of purposes.

Now, this new chart seems to contract that. I was fine with what I gauged to be about a 50 GB burst capacity, but this chart is showing the Evo throtting at around < 10 GB. That's still good, but just a little close to the kind of file sizes I actually move around.

The SX 8200 Pro can't sustain 2800ish megabytes a second of sequential writes for more than 50 gigabytes.

Yeah? And who needs that?

I'm not saying the 970 Pro isn't excellent, but I think it excels in a realm that most people - even power users - never approach. It's a bit like recommending a 28-core CPU for someone who never uses more than about 8 cores.

 

[derekullo]

I think you showed that the 970 Pro can be justified in extreme scenarios, but what you posted actually convinced me that the 970 Evo was entirely equivalent, for the vast majority of purposes.

Now, this new chart seems to contract that. I was fine with what I gauged to be about a 50 GB burst capacity, but this chart is showing the Evo throtting at around < 10 GB. That's still good, but just a little close to the kind of file sizes I actually move around.


Yeah? And who needs that?

I'm not saying the 970 Pro isn't excellent, but I think it excels in a realm that most people - even power users - never approach. It's a bit like recommending a 28-core CPU for someone who never uses more than about 8 cores.

I completely agree.

It is definitely a niche product, but for those within that niche it has highly desirable performance.