"The Samsung PM1725a is strictly speaking outdated, having been succeeded by a PM1725b with newer 3D NAND and a PM1735 with PCIe 4.0. But it's still a flagship model from the top SSD manufacturer, and we don't get to test those very often."
Why? If you've got so much ink for DRAMless and other attempts to produce a drive with HDD costs and SSD performance (hopefully warning people away?) why can't you find some for flagship products from major manufacturers?
The division of Samsung that manages the PM17xx products doesn't really do PR. We only got this drive to play with because MyDigitalDiscount wanted an independent review of the drive they're selling a few thousand of.
The Samsung 983 DCT is managed by a different division than the PM983, and that's why we got to review the 983 DCT, 983 ZET, 883 DCT, and so on. But that division hasn't done a channel/retail version of Samsung's top of the line enterprise drive.
Too bad you don't get more samples of the enterprise stuff. I mean, you have both influencers, recommenders, and straight-up buyers of enterprise storage who read Anandtech.
Some of it is just that I haven't tried very hard to get more enterprise stuff. It worked okay for my schedule to spend 5 weeks straight testing enterprise drives because we didn't have many consumer drives launch over the winter. But during other times of the year, it's tough to justify the time investment of updating a test suite and re-testing a lot of drives. That's part of why this is a 4-vendor roundup instead of 4 separate reviews.
Since this new test suite seems to be working out okay so far, I'll probably do a few more enterprise drives over the next few months. Kingston already sent me a server boot drive after CES, without even asking me. Kioxia has expressed interest in sampling me some stuff. A few vendors have said they expect to have XL-NAND drives real soon, so I need to hit up Samsung for some Z-NAND drives to retest and hopefully keep this time.
And I'll probably run some of these drives through the consumer test suite for kicks, and upload the results to Bench like I did for one of the PBlaze5s and some of the Samsung DCTs.
ESSD firmware engineer here (and yes I have worked in one of the company above). Enterprise business are mostly selling to large system builder so Anandtech is not really "influence" or "recommend" for enterprise business. There are way more requirements than just 99.99 latency and throughput, and buyers tend to focus on the worst case scenarios than the peak best cases. Oh, pricing matters a lot. You need to be cheap enough to make it to the top 3-4 or else you lose a lot of businesses, even if you are qualified.
Well these are Intel owners here. Anything PCIe 4.0 has not even crossed their minds, and are patiently waiting for Intel to move their ass. No chance in hell they dare going AMD Rome way even if it performs better and costs less.
This article makes my love of the P4800X even stronger! :) If only they could get the capacity higher and the pricing lower - true of all storage, though especially desired for Optane-based drives.
Next gen Optane is supposed to significantly raise both capacity and performance. Hopefully Intel is smart and prices their SSD based Optane solutions at a competitive price point.
Ok, great stuff Billy! I know it wasn't really the focus of this review, but dang, I actually came out ludicrously impressed with how very small quantities of first gen optane on relatively low channel installments have such a radically different (and almost always in a good way) behavior to flash. Definitely looking forward to the next generation of this product.
Me, too. It's a pity that we'll probably never see the Micron X100 out in the open, but I'm hopeful about Intel Alder Stream.
I do find it interesting how Optane doesn't even come close to offering the highest throughput (sequential reads or writes or random reads), but its performance varies so little with workload that it excels in all the corner cases where flash fails.
Absolutely. It's so completely counter to the reliance on massive parallelization and over provisioning/cache to hide the inherent weaknesses of flash that I just can't help but being excited about what is actually possible with it.
And honestly most of those corner cases are far more important/common in real world workloads. Mixed read/write, and low QD random reads are hugely important and in those two metrics it annihilates the rest of the drives.
Throughput has alot to do with how many dies you can run in parallel, and since optane has a much lower density (therefore more expensive and lower capacity), they don't have as many dies on the same drive, and that's why peak throughput will not be similar to the monsters out there with 128-256 dies on the same drive. They make it back in other spec of course, and therefore demand a premium for that.
Sequential read/write speed is highly overrated. Random reads and writes make up the majority of a typical workload for most people, though sequential reads will benefit things like game load times and possibly video edit rendering (if processing isn't a bottleneck, which is usually is).
Put another way, if sequential read/write speed was important, tape drives would probably be the dominant storage tech by now.
Some info from the industry is that AWS is internally designing their own SSD and the 2nd generation is based off the same Zao architecture and 96 layer Kioxia NAND that DapuStor makes. For this reason it is likely that it will be a baseline benchmark for most ESSD out there (i.e. you have to be better than that or we can make it cheaper). Samsung is always going to be the powerhouse because they can afford to make a massive controller with so much more circuits that would be too expensive for others. SK Hynix's strategy is to make an expensive controller so they can make money back from the NAND. Dera and DapuStor will likely only focus in China and Africa like their Huawei pal. Micron has a bad reputation as an ESSD vendor and they ended up firing their whole Tidal System team after Sanjay joined, and Sanjay pouched a bunch of WD/SanDisk people to rebuild the whole group from ground up.
I wish higher capacity SSDs were available for consumers. Yes, there are only a small minority of us, but I would gladly purchase a high performance 16TB SSD.
I suspect the m.2 form factor is imperfect for high density solid state storage, however. Between heat issues (my 2 TB 970 EVO has hit 88C in rare cases...with a heatsink. My other 960 EVO without a heatsink has gotten even hotter.) and the lack of physical space for NAND, we will likely have to come up with another solution if capacities are to go up.
Going beyond M.2 for the sake of higher capacity consumer storage would only happen if it becomes significantly cheaper to make SSDs with more than 64 NAND dies, which is currently 4TB for TLC. Per-die capacity is going up slowly over time, but fast enough to keep up with consumer storage needs. In order for the consumer market to shift toward drives with way more than 64 NAND dies, we would need to see per-wafer costs drop dramatically, and that's just not going to happen.
I think the number of consumers both interested in 6GB+ *and* able to afford them are so few, SSD manufacturers figure they can just go buy enterprise stuff.
The lack of an M.2 offering? I have yet to find a single 16 TB M.2 SSD available for retail purchase. I have no problem plunking down a few thousand (provided the performance is comparable to Samsung's offerings).
If you retain the order, it's easier to compare performance of particular drives by glancing from one chart to the next. That's important with a 9-drive roundup.
Normally when they're doing a single product review, that product is highlighted in one color, and it's predecessors or alteratives with another. In that case those items can always be easily spotted in a ranked graph.
Thanks very much Billy, it's a great review! We DapuStor are continuing developing the whole product portfolio and hope we can deliver some great products to fulfill industry needs.
The enterprise market is more serious about QA and product qualification. Phison got a consumer PCIe 4.0 controller out in the middle of 2019, but the quick-and-dirty approach they took for that isn't useful in the enterprise market.
There are lots of consumer and enterprise PCIe 4.0 SSDs coming down the pipeline, but at the moment there's very little that has completed qualification and is ready for widespread production deployment. That was even more true back in November when testing for this review started.
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PaulHoule - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
"The Samsung PM1725a is strictly speaking outdated, having been succeeded by a PM1725b with newer 3D NAND and a PM1735 with PCIe 4.0. But it's still a flagship model from the top SSD manufacturer, and we don't get to test those very often."Why? If you've got so much ink for DRAMless and other attempts to produce a drive with HDD costs and SSD performance (hopefully warning people away?) why can't you find some for flagship products from major manufacturers?
Billy Tallis - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
The division of Samsung that manages the PM17xx products doesn't really do PR. We only got this drive to play with because MyDigitalDiscount wanted an independent review of the drive they're selling a few thousand of.The Samsung 983 DCT is managed by a different division than the PM983, and that's why we got to review the 983 DCT, 983 ZET, 883 DCT, and so on. But that division hasn't done a channel/retail version of Samsung's top of the line enterprise drive.
romrunning - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Too bad you don't get more samples of the enterprise stuff. I mean, you have both influencers, recommenders, and straight-up buyers of enterprise storage who read Anandtech.Billy Tallis - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Some of it is just that I haven't tried very hard to get more enterprise stuff. It worked okay for my schedule to spend 5 weeks straight testing enterprise drives because we didn't have many consumer drives launch over the winter. But during other times of the year, it's tough to justify the time investment of updating a test suite and re-testing a lot of drives. That's part of why this is a 4-vendor roundup instead of 4 separate reviews.Since this new test suite seems to be working out okay so far, I'll probably do a few more enterprise drives over the next few months. Kingston already sent me a server boot drive after CES, without even asking me. Kioxia has expressed interest in sampling me some stuff. A few vendors have said they expect to have XL-NAND drives real soon, so I need to hit up Samsung for some Z-NAND drives to retest and hopefully keep this time.
And I'll probably run some of these drives through the consumer test suite for kicks, and upload the results to Bench like I did for one of the PBlaze5s and some of the Samsung DCTs.
PandaBear - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
ESSD firmware engineer here (and yes I have worked in one of the company above). Enterprise business are mostly selling to large system builder so Anandtech is not really "influence" or "recommend" for enterprise business. There are way more requirements than just 99.99 latency and throughput, and buyers tend to focus on the worst case scenarios than the peak best cases. Oh, pricing matters a lot. You need to be cheap enough to make it to the top 3-4 or else you lose a lot of businesses, even if you are qualified.RobJoy - Tuesday, February 18, 2020 - link
Well these are Intel owners here.Anything PCIe 4.0 has not even crossed their minds, and are patiently waiting for Intel to move their ass.
No chance in hell they dare going AMD Rome way even if it performs better and costs less.
romrunning - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
This article makes my love of the P4800X even stronger! :) If only they could get the capacity higher and the pricing lower - true of all storage, though especially desired for Optane-based drives.curufinwewins - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
100% agreed, it's such a paradigm shifter by comparison.eek2121 - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Next gen Optane is supposed to significantly raise both capacity and performance. Hopefully Intel is smart and prices their SSD based Optane solutions at a competitive price point.curufinwewins - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Ok, great stuff Billy! I know it wasn't really the focus of this review, but dang, I actually came out ludicrously impressed with how very small quantities of first gen optane on relatively low channel installments have such a radically different (and almost always in a good way) behavior to flash. Definitely looking forward to the next generation of this product.Billy Tallis - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Me, too. It's a pity that we'll probably never see the Micron X100 out in the open, but I'm hopeful about Intel Alder Stream.I do find it interesting how Optane doesn't even come close to offering the highest throughput (sequential reads or writes or random reads), but its performance varies so little with workload that it excels in all the corner cases where flash fails.
curufinwewins - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Absolutely. It's so completely counter to the reliance on massive parallelization and over provisioning/cache to hide the inherent weaknesses of flash that I just can't help but being excited about what is actually possible with it.extide - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
And honestly most of those corner cases are far more important/common in real world workloads. Mixed read/write, and low QD random reads are hugely important and in those two metrics it annihilates the rest of the drives.PandaBear - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Throughput has alot to do with how many dies you can run in parallel, and since optane has a much lower density (therefore more expensive and lower capacity), they don't have as many dies on the same drive, and that's why peak throughput will not be similar to the monsters out there with 128-256 dies on the same drive. They make it back in other spec of course, and therefore demand a premium for that.swarm3d - Monday, February 17, 2020 - link
Sequential read/write speed is highly overrated. Random reads and writes make up the majority of a typical workload for most people, though sequential reads will benefit things like game load times and possibly video edit rendering (if processing isn't a bottleneck, which is usually is).Put another way, if sequential read/write speed was important, tape drives would probably be the dominant storage tech by now.
PandaBear - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Some info from the industry is that AWS is internally designing their own SSD and the 2nd generation is based off the same Zao architecture and 96 layer Kioxia NAND that DapuStor makes. For this reason it is likely that it will be a baseline benchmark for most ESSD out there (i.e. you have to be better than that or we can make it cheaper). Samsung is always going to be the powerhouse because they can afford to make a massive controller with so much more circuits that would be too expensive for others. SK Hynix's strategy is to make an expensive controller so they can make money back from the NAND. Dera and DapuStor will likely only focus in China and Africa like their Huawei pal. Micron has a bad reputation as an ESSD vendor and they ended up firing their whole Tidal System team after Sanjay joined, and Sanjay pouched a bunch of WD/SanDisk people to rebuild the whole group from ground up.eek2121 - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
I wish higher capacity SSDs were available for consumers. Yes, there are only a small minority of us, but I would gladly purchase a high performance 16TB SSD.I suspect the m.2 form factor is imperfect for high density solid state storage, however. Between heat issues (my 2 TB 970 EVO has hit 88C in rare cases...with a heatsink. My other 960 EVO without a heatsink has gotten even hotter.) and the lack of physical space for NAND, we will likely have to come up with another solution if capacities are to go up.
Billy Tallis - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Going beyond M.2 for the sake of higher capacity consumer storage would only happen if it becomes significantly cheaper to make SSDs with more than 64 NAND dies, which is currently 4TB for TLC. Per-die capacity is going up slowly over time, but fast enough to keep up with consumer storage needs. In order for the consumer market to shift toward drives with way more than 64 NAND dies, we would need to see per-wafer costs drop dramatically, and that's just not going to happen.Hul8 - Saturday, February 15, 2020 - link
I think the number of consumers both interested in 6GB+ *and* able to afford them are so few, SSD manufacturers figure they can just go buy enterprise stuff.Hul8 - Saturday, February 15, 2020 - link
*6TB+, obviously... :-DJames5mith - Monday, February 17, 2020 - link
"... but I would gladly purchase a high performance 16TB SSD."Then do so. They aren't ridiculously priced anymore. It's $2000-$4000 per drive depending on manufacturer and interface type.
What is stopping you?
The Micro 9300 Pro 15.36TB is ~$3000 on average. That's a U.2. interface drive. Too slow?
eek2121 - Monday, February 17, 2020 - link
The lack of an M.2 offering? I have yet to find a single 16 TB M.2 SSD available for retail purchase. I have no problem plunking down a few thousand (provided the performance is comparable to Samsung's offerings).CrystalCowboy - Tuesday, February 18, 2020 - link
Most enterprise drives come either in U.2 or in PCIe. And you can buy PCIe-U.2 adapters.CrystalCowboy - Tuesday, February 18, 2020 - link
For that matter, M.2 - U.2 adapters are available and cheap.NV_Me - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Thanks for all of the insights Billy! BTW I like the addition of the drop down selection on top,For the PE6011, what is the TBW on either the 1.92TB or 7.68TB drive? I was curious to know if this was a true "1 DWPD" drive.
Billy Tallis - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
The full spec sheet for the PE6011 just says 1.0 DWPD. It doesn't list TBW.NV_Me - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Next time would it be possible to RANK the charts high-low or low-high for improved readability?Hul8 - Saturday, February 15, 2020 - link
If you retain the order, it's easier to compare performance of particular drives by glancing from one chart to the next. That's important with a 9-drive roundup.Normally when they're doing a single product review, that product is highlighted in one color, and it's predecessors or alteratives with another. In that case those items can always be easily spotted in a ranked graph.
JohnLee-SZ - Friday, February 14, 2020 - link
Thanks very much Billy, it's a great review! We DapuStor are continuing developing the whole product portfolio and hope we can deliver some great products to fulfill industry needs.CrystalCowboy - Tuesday, February 18, 2020 - link
PCIe 3.0? Are we supposed to take this seriously?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 18, 2020 - link
The enterprise market is more serious about QA and product qualification. Phison got a consumer PCIe 4.0 controller out in the middle of 2019, but the quick-and-dirty approach they took for that isn't useful in the enterprise market.There are lots of consumer and enterprise PCIe 4.0 SSDs coming down the pipeline, but at the moment there's very little that has completed qualification and is ready for widespread production deployment. That was even more true back in November when testing for this review started.