Somehow I think that I'll never be able to recover in the faster response times of this drive the time it would take me to swap it against the 980 Pro I currently have in my Ryzen 5800X workstation...
Against any other with similar price and capacity, it would win. In absolute terms, I doubt it really matters for most, because the bottleneck will be somewhere else.
I think that this is. a decent drive after skimming threw the article but i definitely do wonder how far the M.2 standard will be in use obviously a while im not saying its obsolete but when U.3 exists. I think that 2.5in drives will make a come back because in all honesty you cant fit everything on a 2tb drive and capacity that high is EXPENSIVE so i think 2.5in U.3 is gonna be where its at and im gonna wait for it to, i wanna get something better than a hdd for my game storage but when sata is going out i dont wanna buy a sata ssd.
eva: true. SATA hasn't been updated in over a decade (unlike SAS) and it'll be some time before consumer-class drives can saturate a 6Gbps link (currently almost none can even saturate a 3Gbps link.)
With MAMR, HAMR, etc coming to market, performance is finally going to increase where areal density was historically the only way sequential transfers went up, so drives might start cracking SATA2 bandwidth. I suspect when drives near SATA3 bandwidth, it'll either be so long from now that hard disk technology in the consumer space will be dead (replaced by cheap NAND storage) as hard disk technology seems to be focusing on data centers where SAS is common and already capable of 12Gbps+, or consumers that wish to actually use magnetic disk storage will adopt SAS.
2.5 in drives and U.X won't make a comeback outside a server room, which is what that combination is designed for. The trend for personal devices is smaller and lighter, not bigger and bulkier. I would expect M.2 and gum stick drives to evolve, in step with PCIe, but it's not going away for at least another decade.
2.5” is dead for casual home use. I used to think it had a place in the office, but with the rise of laptop-powered WFH and the popularity of space-saving small SFF computers for the office I don’t see it as having a future.
Your point about cost makes no sense. 2 TB+ of SSD chips is expensive. It makes no difference whether it’s on an m.2 stick or in a half empty U.3 case, it costs the same either way. With U.3 there’s a (small) extra cost for the packaging, plus the extra wires and extra ports required and extra assembly steps. Might be worth it in the datacentre but not for price-sensitive home or office market where 99% of drives are never swapped.
I think M.2 is here to stay. You are looking for economies of scale in NVMe M.2 drive capacity--that will happen as time goes on. It's remarkable to me how fast M.2 drives have ratcheted up in performance and capacity already. But, hey, if you need the economic capacity there's always the old 7200 rpm standby, right? These super-capacity drives will be around for a long while--but eventually M.2 will supplant them, imo.
My older PCIe3 960 EVO M.2 boot drive would throttle regularly in large tasks, like doing a full AV Defender scan on C:\. The drive always crashed and never completed a full C:\ scan. This doesn't happen with the 980 Pro at all, and it's running in the same mboard and in the same slot the 960 ran in--using the same heatsink--just a flat sink that came with the mboard. Things are improving rapidly on the NVMe M.2 front, imo.
"Threw is the past tense of the verb throw. It’s the word you use to say that something threw you for a loop or threw you off. Through is an adverb and a preposition. It’s used to say that you entered on one side of something and exited on the other."
There are a few 4 and 8TB m.2 drives out already, so a stick with more than 2TB might be practical for you before any switch to the mostly-enterprise u.3 form factor. Not that there's anything wrong with holding on to your current stuff! :)
With the SK Hynix P31 performing so well for the money, especially in efficiency, I'll be keeping an eye out for PCI-E 4.0 offerings from them.
I'm currently booting from a 2.5" MX500 1TB. Since I have an X570 board, it feels like my next drive purchase should be PCI-E 4.0. Thankfully, I doubt these things provide any appreciable difference in performance over a good SATA SSD for the vast majority of applications I use, so I can stand to wait for the prices to come down. Given the choice between buying a 1TB SSD with blistering fast performance for $200, or one that generally benchmarks lower but uses less power, runs cooler and provides an almost identical experience for $135 (with sales often much lower)... its hard to justify the more expensive one.
For desktops, I think I'd need to see a review that measured thermals, overall system temperature and cooling noise as well as performance. Sure more performance is technically better, but if it is only noticeable in synthetic benchmarks (for now), adding several more watts of heat output to the area between your CPU and GPU isn't the best thing. Also, not having to worry as much about your SSD if ambient temps get a bit toasty is nice too.
For the record, if prices were close I would still opt for more speed unless it was a really huge thermal\power penalty. At this point though, the $65-$90 (depending on sales) price difference is quite large. There's some wisdom in waiting for applications to start utilizing ultra high speed NVMe storage before investing extra money in it.
Kind of like buying 64GB of RAM for future proofing. By the time you need it, RAM is faster and cheaper per GB.
I'm hoping they'll make denser 3.0x4 offerings for the laptop space, especially if they can keep a lower power profile and decent thermals. I won't care about 4x4 until I'm upgrading to AM5 on my desktop, probably.
Sadly Optane is dying. Micron has just abandoned 3D Xpoint, and Intel completely messed up their dual drives and most of the Optane range is MIA.
This WD 850 gives you almost as much performance as Optane in the office or at home, at at a fraction of the price. There are other server orientated SSDs that are also becoming almost as good as Optane in the server space, again at far cheaper prices. It’s sad, I had high hopes for Optane but it seems Intel couldn’t scale it out.
And this Optane 905 isn't even that "great" so to speak. ( Even though it is very expensive, think of it as low cost Optane ) I want to see how Optane PX5800 perform.
With that said, I am very suspired at the latency WD has managed to achieve. Even for Professional and enthusiast, it will be more than enough for 90+% of use case.
For people who want performance and endurance above price, it would be nice if one of the major manufacturers made a variant with a firmware change that used the NAND in SLC mode only. This would reduce the capacity to 1/3 of the usual TLC mode but would give the same speed as SLC cache mode for the whole of the drive. (No hardware change would be needed - just different firmware for the controller.)
You could get something like the Sabrent Rocket Q, and leave 75% of it unpartitioned. The Anandtech review makes it clear that in that mode, it will use the other 25% as SLC. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16136/qlc-8tb-ssd-r...
I was looking for something just like this, it's this or Optane, and if QLC/TLC drive manufacturers did offer this in firmware or partitioning, Optane for consumers might as well be dead.
Thanks Billy! One aspect of this and the other PCIe 4.0 drives I have been wondering about is: do they really need 4 lanes to reach their full speed? The reason for my question is that I can imagine situations (e.g. Intel's Rocket Lake) where only 20 or even fewer total 4.0 lanes are available, and having 2 lanes more left for other uses might make a difference. So, are those 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes per drive really needed for full speed of this and similar SSDs?
I've been Really enjoying the performance of my new Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. I think Anandtech should add it to the comparisons for PCIe 4.0 drives going forward.
Answer is no but he's mentioned it earlier in the comment section "As I mentioned in the article, my first Phison E18 drive arrived yesterday and I don't have complete results yet. But the first batch of results is in Bench:" https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2732?vs=27...
Nah, I'm just a big fan. Like others here though, I wish I also had a 905p for my OS drive due to the sheer performance. But for a bulk data drive, the Sabrent 4 Plus has been awesome.
Everytime though these PCIe 4.0 drives come out though, nothing can beat the performance of the 905p unless you are talking raw sequential numbers.
Nice review! It’s amazing to see how fast SSDs are developing - I well remember the pain of running everything off HDDs. What’s even more impressive is there seems to be no natural limit in sight for SSD speeds - it feels like peak speeds are doubling around every 18 months.
I failed to see why did you put the Optane 905P drive in the mix... It's a $2,500 enterprise drive in the middle of ~$200 costumer drives. It's like throwing in a Xeon Scalable/Epyc when benchmarking a Core i7/Ryzen 7. All it does is distort the graphs, making it harder to see how the drives fare against each other. It would only make sense if you were writing an article comparing costumer grade hardware vs enterprise grade hardware.
The Optane 905P is technically a consumer/enthusiast drive. The enterprise version is the P4800X, which doesn't have RGB LEDs. I included the 905P because it is somewhat relevant when discussing the fastest consumer drives that money can buy, but I left out the power consumption data because that would have distorted all of those graphs.
Pretty much. On the old test suite, I measured it as 7.3W idle, 8.5W for QD1 random read, up to 17.1W for sequential writes (2.2GiB/s). I'm really curious to see if second-gen 3DXP in the P5800X improves on that.
Why are the write latencies so much lower than the read latencies? (For all the drives.) Is this normal for SSDs? I hadn't noticed this pattern before, or read anything about it. My assumption is that reading should be faster than writing.
To really move the needle on latency we'll need to move away from PCIe to something like OpenCAPI, which is a much faster interface. Optane can't really stretch out to its full potential if it's going to be hitched to PCIe, even 4.0. With the end of Moore's Law, we really need to optimize the I/O as much as possible, and get rid of interfaces and buses that require many thousands of CPU cycles per transaction.
By the way, why is there no energy usage data for the Optane drive in the results? It seems to be missing for all benchmarks. That drive is in all the performance results except energy usage.
Reading a single page from NAND flash is a lot faster than programming a page. But writes can be cached and several smaller writes can be saved up to be issued in a batch that better uses the parallelism inside the SSD. So the amortized cost of writes can be much lower. Of course, this poses some risk to data in the event of power loss, but that's a generally-accepted tradeoff for consumer systems.
The power data for the Optane 905P was left off because its idle power is higher than the peak load power of almost all of the other drives. There aren't a lot of interesting comparisons to be made there. The Optane drive is always the most power-hungry, by far. It would be even without the RGB LEDs. It only has a chance of being competitive on power efficiency for low-QD random reads.
Optane is so perfect as a home DeskTop OS drive where the low QD and latency really can be taken advantage of along with it's Random IO and Latency advantages.
The vast majority of home users are 90/10 Read/Write.
'Of course, this poses some risk to data in the event of power loss, but that's a generally-accepted tradeoff for consumer systems.'
Didn't some consumer SSDs have a capacitor to prevent data loss? Has that feature been lost due to the smaller form factor (versus SATA), or is it mainly due to cost-cutting?
There may have been a few "consumer" SSDs back in the very early days that had full power loss protection, but that has been an enterprise-only feature for as long as SSDs have been even remotely mainstream for consumers. (Exceptions: Intel 750 and Optane SSDs, which are re-branded enterprise drives and do have power loss protection.)
There have been some consumer SSDs with partial power loss protection, designed to prevent data already on the drive from being corrupted by later writes that get interrupted by a power loss (but making no guarantees about completing any in-progress writes). This doesn't require extra capacitors for writes to SLC or any other single-pass writing (which includes a lot of TLC, if not all of it these days). And since there are also other good reasons not to leave a page in a partially-programmed state for long, I suspect most consumer SSDs have moved away from ever needing the kind of capacitor banks we saw on eg. early Crucial MX series drives.
Does having a laptop battery or desktop UPS effectively take the place of power-loss capacitors on an SSD? I would think it does, but I'd like to be sure.
A UPS vs power loss protection capacitors defend against slightly different sets of failure conditions, with a lot of overlap. A UPS will help save more data when the utility power goes out, but PLP caps will save data that a UPS couldn't if your PSU blows up or some other component failure inside the PC causes it to crash hard.
Is there a benchmark that shows "real-world' performance are not worth the premium between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0? Like how it translates in terms of time saved. CPU benchmark for web page loading is a good example. The benchmark numbers might be 2x or 10x but it doesn't mean anything if it means 1 second vs. 0.1 second. On the other hand, the difference from HDD to SSD is from going minutes to seconds.
The delta between 4.0 and 3.0 is so wide now. It doesn't do us any good by showing benchmark numbers that are 2x across the board between SN850 and SN750 but then recommend the value proposition just isn't there for PCIe 4.0 in the real world.
I do agree that it would be nice if Anandtech would add some real world benchmarks to show use scenarios for the most common tasks like loading Windows, various video game load times, common program launching, etc. I have a very high-end rig but I still boot off of 3 x Samsung 850 evos in RAID 0 because as far as I can tell, there is no significant benefit to switching to an mvne drive for my use case of working from my desktop providing high level tech support and gaming.
Excellent review. See if you guys can a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus sample and do a review on it! It's supposedly a little faster that the WD 850 in synthetics, but perhaps a little slower in real-world usage. It will be a close match up, that's for sure.
I don't have a Rocket 4 Plus, but I have Micro Center's equivalent: Inland Performance Plus. It's currently running The Destroyer, and has already completed the synthetic tests. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2732?vs=27...
the fact that, what, no more than a handful make NAND. if they choose, whether through collusion or simultaneous profit-seeking, to sell only QLC and PLC what are you going to do about it? invoke the Defense Production Act to force SLC production at reduced prices? unfettered capitalism never favours the consumer.
SLC shouldn't be so drastically faster than TLC if MLC is not.
So, if the data does indeed suggest what you're saying then it suggests that Samsung's implementation of MLC is lacking. MLC should be between SLC and TLC in performance, not 'dead' (equivalent to TLC).
I appreciate the idle power numbers but they are really meaningless. Why don't you show sequential and random write power consumption which should be in the 25 to 40 W range. Until the drive starts heating up and the performance collapses as a consequence of thermal throttling. Anything else is, er, marketing collateral at best
What are you talking about? The power numbers reported here are for the drive itself, not the whole computer system's wall power consumption. Even the Optane SSD included in this review doesn't hit 25W, let alone 40W. M.2 drives rarely break 8W. SATA SSD usually stay under 5W. And the idle power numbers are not at all meaningless; consumer SSDs spend the overwhelming majority of their time idle.
Just picked up a SN850, and the model number is WDBAPY0010BNC, however it was advertised as the model in this review, the WDS100T1X0E. What did I just buy?
I've seen articles about companies changing part revisions that are not as fast as the ones sent out for reviews.
Hi, guys, lame question – does this pci-4 thing means that I need a new pci-4-friendly controller to use it? Or it’s just completely internal matter and any - for example - pci-friendly-usb3.2 external case will work with it?
PCIe is backwards-compatible: the host and the device will negotiate the highest link speed and widest lane count that are supported by both end points. So a Gen4 SSD in a motherboard that only supports Gen3 will work fine, limited to Gen3 speeds. A Gen4 SSD in a USB to NVMe enclosure that only provides PCIe Gen3 x2 to the drive will likewise be compatible, but with severely crippled performance.
I just bought one to use with my new Z690 build. Going to be awesome. I already have a 2TB Nvme m.2 Samsung 960 PRO I of course will keep as well, but will use this as "main drive". Seems awesome.
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Chaitanya - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Very interesting drive.bernstein - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
great review! thanks @anandtechabufrejoval - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Somehow I think that I'll never be able to recover in the faster response times of this drive the time it would take me to swap it against the 980 Pro I currently have in my Ryzen 5800X workstation...Against any other with similar price and capacity, it would win. In absolute terms, I doubt it really matters for most, because the bottleneck will be somewhere else.
abufrejoval - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
actually an MLC 970 pro... need editXabanakFanatik - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I was going to say.... Seems like this is a better performing drive than the 980 Pro. 970 pro, it's a close call. The upside is this ca be had in 2TBbji - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
If you swap it at a time when you otherwise would not be using the computer, then you effectively don't have to "recover" anything.Spunjji - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
No, but that's an odd way to look at it. There's no need to replace a perfectly good drive!Linustechtips12#6900xt - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I think that this is. a decent drive after skimming threw the article but i definitely do wonder how far the M.2 standard will be in use obviously a while im not saying its obsolete but when U.3 exists. I think that 2.5in drives will make a come back because in all honesty you cant fit everything on a 2tb drive and capacity that high is EXPENSIVE so i think 2.5in U.3 is gonna be where its at and im gonna wait for it to, i wanna get something better than a hdd for my game storage but when sata is going out i dont wanna buy a sata ssd.eva02langley - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
The playstation 5 use NVMe, so it is going to be around for a while. SATA is definitely dead.futrtrubl - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Don't confuse NVMe and M.2.Samus - Tuesday, March 23, 2021 - link
eva: true. SATA hasn't been updated in over a decade (unlike SAS) and it'll be some time before consumer-class drives can saturate a 6Gbps link (currently almost none can even saturate a 3Gbps link.)With MAMR, HAMR, etc coming to market, performance is finally going to increase where areal density was historically the only way sequential transfers went up, so drives might start cracking SATA2 bandwidth. I suspect when drives near SATA3 bandwidth, it'll either be so long from now that hard disk technology in the consumer space will be dead (replaced by cheap NAND storage) as hard disk technology seems to be focusing on data centers where SAS is common and already capable of 12Gbps+, or consumers that wish to actually use magnetic disk storage will adopt SAS.
Molor1880 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
2.5 in drives and U.X won't make a comeback outside a server room, which is what that combination is designed for. The trend for personal devices is smaller and lighter, not bigger and bulkier. I would expect M.2 and gum stick drives to evolve, in step with PCIe, but it's not going away for at least another decade.Tomatotech - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
2.5” is dead for casual home use. I used to think it had a place in the office, but with the rise of laptop-powered WFH and the popularity of space-saving small SFF computers for the office I don’t see it as having a future.Your point about cost makes no sense. 2 TB+ of SSD chips is expensive. It makes no difference whether it’s on an m.2 stick or in a half empty U.3 case, it costs the same either way. With U.3 there’s a (small) extra cost for the packaging, plus the extra wires and extra ports required and extra assembly steps. Might be worth it in the datacentre but not for price-sensitive home or office market where 99% of drives are never swapped.
Tomatotech - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Ninja’d by Molor1880!WaltC - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I think M.2 is here to stay. You are looking for economies of scale in NVMe M.2 drive capacity--that will happen as time goes on. It's remarkable to me how fast M.2 drives have ratcheted up in performance and capacity already. But, hey, if you need the economic capacity there's always the old 7200 rpm standby, right? These super-capacity drives will be around for a long while--but eventually M.2 will supplant them, imo.My older PCIe3 960 EVO M.2 boot drive would throttle regularly in large tasks, like doing a full AV Defender scan on C:\. The drive always crashed and never completed a full C:\ scan. This doesn't happen with the 980 Pro at all, and it's running in the same mboard and in the same slot the 960 ran in--using the same heatsink--just a flat sink that came with the mboard. Things are improving rapidly on the NVMe M.2 front, imo.
damianrobertjones - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
"Threw is the past tense of the verb throw. It’s the word you use to say that something threw you for a loop or threw you off. Through is an adverb and a preposition. It’s used to say that you entered on one side of something and exited on the other."Not sure if 2.5" drives have gone anywhere?
twotwotwo - Wednesday, April 21, 2021 - link
There are a few 4 and 8TB m.2 drives out already, so a stick with more than 2TB might be practical for you before any switch to the mostly-enterprise u.3 form factor. Not that there's anything wrong with holding on to your current stuff! :)Makaveli - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
"Later this year we're expecting another wave of Phison E18 drives to arrive using 176L 3D TLC NAND"This is what i'm waiting to see.
I don't like that all the new generation drives also all took a reduction in TBW and all seem to have smaller SLC caches minus this WD drive.
ozzuneoj86 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
With the SK Hynix P31 performing so well for the money, especially in efficiency, I'll be keeping an eye out for PCI-E 4.0 offerings from them.I'm currently booting from a 2.5" MX500 1TB. Since I have an X570 board, it feels like my next drive purchase should be PCI-E 4.0. Thankfully, I doubt these things provide any appreciable difference in performance over a good SATA SSD for the vast majority of applications I use, so I can stand to wait for the prices to come down. Given the choice between buying a 1TB SSD with blistering fast performance for $200, or one that generally benchmarks lower but uses less power, runs cooler and provides an almost identical experience for $135 (with sales often much lower)... its hard to justify the more expensive one.
lmcd - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Imo in a laptop it's impossible to justify a faster SSD that consumes more power.In a desktop, though, I can see it making sense for certain workloads.
lmcd - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
*a faster, but not substantially faster, SSD that consumes nearly 2x the power.ozzuneoj86 - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Absolutely agree for laptops.For desktops, I think I'd need to see a review that measured thermals, overall system temperature and cooling noise as well as performance. Sure more performance is technically better, but if it is only noticeable in synthetic benchmarks (for now), adding several more watts of heat output to the area between your CPU and GPU isn't the best thing. Also, not having to worry as much about your SSD if ambient temps get a bit toasty is nice too.
For the record, if prices were close I would still opt for more speed unless it was a really huge thermal\power penalty. At this point though, the $65-$90 (depending on sales) price difference is quite large. There's some wisdom in waiting for applications to start utilizing ultra high speed NVMe storage before investing extra money in it.
Kind of like buying 64GB of RAM for future proofing. By the time you need it, RAM is faster and cheaper per GB.
artifex - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I'm hoping they'll make denser 3.0x4 offerings for the laptop space, especially if they can keep a lower power profile and decent thermals. I won't care about 4x4 until I'm upgrading to AM5 on my desktop, probably.Kamen Rider Blade - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
All this review does is make me want Optane even more.That sheer utter consistency is what I'm looking for.
And that sweet low latency.
Tomatotech - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Sadly Optane is dying. Micron has just abandoned 3D Xpoint, and Intel completely messed up their dual drives and most of the Optane range is MIA.This WD 850 gives you almost as much performance as Optane in the office or at home, at at a fraction of the price. There are other server orientated SSDs that are also becoming almost as good as Optane in the server space, again at far cheaper prices. It’s sad, I had high hopes for Optane but it seems Intel couldn’t scale it out.
ksec - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
And this Optane 905 isn't even that "great" so to speak. ( Even though it is very expensive, think of it as low cost Optane ) I want to see how Optane PX5800 perform.With that said, I am very suspired at the latency WD has managed to achieve. Even for Professional and enthusiast, it will be more than enough for 90+% of use case.
Spunjji - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
For what purpose?arashi - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
Epeen.FatFlatulentGit - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
No Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus in the benches? I'm baffled that it's not there seeing as how it's probably the most likely competitor for this drive.Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
As I mentioned in the article, my first Phison E18 drive arrived yesterday and I don't have complete results yet. But the first batch of results is in Bench: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2732?vs=27...Duncan Macdonald - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
For people who want performance and endurance above price, it would be nice if one of the major manufacturers made a variant with a firmware change that used the NAND in SLC mode only. This would reduce the capacity to 1/3 of the usual TLC mode but would give the same speed as SLC cache mode for the whole of the drive. (No hardware change would be needed - just different firmware for the controller.)jamesindevon - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
You could get something like the Sabrent Rocket Q, and leave 75% of it unpartitioned. The Anandtech review makes it clear that in that mode, it will use the other 25% as SLC.https://www.anandtech.com/show/16136/qlc-8tb-ssd-r...
ichaya - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
I was looking for something just like this, it's this or Optane, and if QLC/TLC drive manufacturers did offer this in firmware or partitioning, Optane for consumers might as well be dead.FunBunny2 - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
"firmware change that used the NAND in SLC mode only"I seem to recall, likely here, that SLC mode for [M/T/Q]LC NAND isn't near the performance of 'real' SLC NAND. anyone?
Fujikoma - Monday, March 29, 2021 - link
SLC=2/MLC=4/TLC=8/QLC=16... would be 1/4. Personally would be happy if they offered MLC for the enthusiast versions.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Thanks Billy!One aspect of this and the other PCIe 4.0 drives I have been wondering about is: do they really need 4 lanes to reach their full speed? The reason for my question is that I can imagine situations (e.g. Intel's Rocket Lake) where only 20 or even fewer total 4.0 lanes are available, and having 2 lanes more left for other uses might make a difference. So, are those 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes per drive really needed for full speed of this and similar SSDs?
James5mith - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Yes. 4x PCIe4.0 lanes is ~8GB/s full duplex bandwidth (2GB/s per lane). These drives are hitting 7+GB/s of bandwidth at max utilization.James5mith - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I've been Really enjoying the performance of my new Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. I think Anandtech should add it to the comparisons for PCIe 4.0 drives going forward.James5mith - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
https://www.sabrent.com/product/SB-RKT4P-4TB/4tb-r...Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
... Is this astroturfing?Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Answer is no but he's mentioned it earlier in the comment section"As I mentioned in the article, my first Phison E18 drive arrived yesterday and I don't have complete results yet. But the first batch of results is in Bench:"
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2732?vs=27...
James5mith - Saturday, March 20, 2021 - link
Nah, I'm just a big fan. Like others here though, I wish I also had a 905p for my OS drive due to the sheer performance. But for a bulk data drive, the Sabrent 4 Plus has been awesome.Everytime though these PCIe 4.0 drives come out though, nothing can beat the performance of the 905p unless you are talking raw sequential numbers.
Tomatotech - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Nice review! It’s amazing to see how fast SSDs are developing - I well remember the pain of running everything off HDDs. What’s even more impressive is there seems to be no natural limit in sight for SSD speeds - it feels like peak speeds are doubling around every 18 months.Makaveli - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Peak Sequential speeds are doubling, however there are still other area's to improve on.cx1983 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I failed to see why did you put the Optane 905P drive in the mix... It's a $2,500 enterprise drive in the middle of ~$200 costumer drives. It's like throwing in a Xeon Scalable/Epyc when benchmarking a Core i7/Ryzen 7. All it does is distort the graphs, making it harder to see how the drives fare against each other.It would only make sense if you were writing an article comparing costumer grade hardware vs enterprise grade hardware.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
The Optane 905P is technically a consumer/enthusiast drive. The enterprise version is the P4800X, which doesn't have RGB LEDs. I included the 905P because it is somewhat relevant when discussing the fastest consumer drives that money can buy, but I left out the power consumption data because that would have distorted all of those graphs.Slash3 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Power Consumption: YesBilly Tallis - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Pretty much. On the old test suite, I measured it as 7.3W idle, 8.5W for QD1 random read, up to 17.1W for sequential writes (2.2GiB/s). I'm really curious to see if second-gen 3DXP in the P5800X improves on that.Hifihedgehog - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Unlimited... POWER!MDD1963 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
About 4 years ago, it took X99 and three 950 Pros in RAID 0 to allow 1M IOPS...; this is quite impressive!Pinn - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Would love to see thermals.JoeDuarte - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Why are the write latencies so much lower than the read latencies? (For all the drives.) Is this normal for SSDs? I hadn't noticed this pattern before, or read anything about it. My assumption is that reading should be faster than writing.To really move the needle on latency we'll need to move away from PCIe to something like OpenCAPI, which is a much faster interface. Optane can't really stretch out to its full potential if it's going to be hitched to PCIe, even 4.0. With the end of Moore's Law, we really need to optimize the I/O as much as possible, and get rid of interfaces and buses that require many thousands of CPU cycles per transaction.
By the way, why is there no energy usage data for the Optane drive in the results? It seems to be missing for all benchmarks. That drive is in all the performance results except energy usage.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Reading a single page from NAND flash is a lot faster than programming a page. But writes can be cached and several smaller writes can be saved up to be issued in a batch that better uses the parallelism inside the SSD. So the amortized cost of writes can be much lower. Of course, this poses some risk to data in the event of power loss, but that's a generally-accepted tradeoff for consumer systems.The power data for the Optane 905P was left off because its idle power is higher than the peak load power of almost all of the other drives. There aren't a lot of interesting comparisons to be made there. The Optane drive is always the most power-hungry, by far. It would be even without the RGB LEDs. It only has a chance of being competitive on power efficiency for low-QD random reads.
Kamen Rider Blade - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Optane is so perfect as a home DeskTop OS drive where the low QD and latency really can be taken advantage of along with it's Random IO and Latency advantages.The vast majority of home users are 90/10 Read/Write.
Spunjji - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Only, for that usage, the price/capacity trade-off makes it poor value for money - and the advantages it does confer are barely noticeable in use.FunBunny2 - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
"Optane is so perfect as a home DeskTop OS drive where the low QD and latency really can be taken advantage of"I would argue the opposite: Optane, et al, make the most sense for industrial strength RDBMS, used in App Mode.
Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
'Of course, this poses some risk to data in the event of power loss, but that's a generally-accepted tradeoff for consumer systems.'Didn't some consumer SSDs have a capacitor to prevent data loss? Has that feature been lost due to the smaller form factor (versus SATA), or is it mainly due to cost-cutting?
Billy Tallis - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
There may have been a few "consumer" SSDs back in the very early days that had full power loss protection, but that has been an enterprise-only feature for as long as SSDs have been even remotely mainstream for consumers. (Exceptions: Intel 750 and Optane SSDs, which are re-branded enterprise drives and do have power loss protection.)There have been some consumer SSDs with partial power loss protection, designed to prevent data already on the drive from being corrupted by later writes that get interrupted by a power loss (but making no guarantees about completing any in-progress writes). This doesn't require extra capacitors for writes to SLC or any other single-pass writing (which includes a lot of TLC, if not all of it these days). And since there are also other good reasons not to leave a page in a partially-programmed state for long, I suspect most consumer SSDs have moved away from ever needing the kind of capacitor banks we saw on eg. early Crucial MX series drives.
Oxford Guy - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link
I can imagine that consumers who spends thousands on things like GPUs would be hard-pressed to pay for a capacitor.Good thing the flash drive companies are so watchful of our crucial pennies.
Mikewind Dale - Friday, March 26, 2021 - link
Does having a laptop battery or desktop UPS effectively take the place of power-loss capacitors on an SSD? I would think it does, but I'd like to be sure.Billy Tallis - Friday, March 26, 2021 - link
A UPS vs power loss protection capacitors defend against slightly different sets of failure conditions, with a lot of overlap. A UPS will help save more data when the utility power goes out, but PLP caps will save data that a UPS couldn't if your PSU blows up or some other component failure inside the PC causes it to crash hard.wr3zzz - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Is there a benchmark that shows "real-world' performance are not worth the premium between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0? Like how it translates in terms of time saved. CPU benchmark for web page loading is a good example. The benchmark numbers might be 2x or 10x but it doesn't mean anything if it means 1 second vs. 0.1 second. On the other hand, the difference from HDD to SSD is from going minutes to seconds.The delta between 4.0 and 3.0 is so wide now. It doesn't do us any good by showing benchmark numbers that are 2x across the board between SN850 and SN750 but then recommend the value proposition just isn't there for PCIe 4.0 in the real world.
oRAirwolf - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
I do agree that it would be nice if Anandtech would add some real world benchmarks to show use scenarios for the most common tasks like loading Windows, various video game load times, common program launching, etc. I have a very high-end rig but I still boot off of 3 x Samsung 850 evos in RAID 0 because as far as I can tell, there is no significant benefit to switching to an mvne drive for my use case of working from my desktop providing high level tech support and gaming.Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
You should be able to compare the 'light' workload of 3.0 drives to the 'light' workload of 4.0 drives using their Bench comparison page.I'd pay particular attention to latency results. High latency can make things feel slow.
'The benchmark numbers might be 2x or 10x but it doesn't mean anything if it means 1 second vs. 0.1 second.'
Not true. .1 second latency (time to wake to do something) is a lot snappier than 1 second latency.
Morawka - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Excellent review. See if you guys can a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus sample and do a review on it! It's supposedly a little faster that the WD 850 in synthetics, but perhaps a little slower in real-world usage. It will be a close match up, that's for sure.Billy Tallis - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
I don't have a Rocket 4 Plus, but I have Micro Center's equivalent: Inland Performance Plus. It's currently running The Destroyer, and has already completed the synthetic tests. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2732?vs=27...Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
Glad to hear there is a firmware update. I wasn't sure that Inland drives would be eligible for them.Spunjji - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
"MLC is now dead, and there's no compelling reason to bring it back"Oooof, that's gonna chafe the NAND conspiracy-theorists who frequent these hallowed comments 😅
Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
3D fabrication made TLC viable. It has not remedied the deficiencies of QLC and now Intel is reportedly planning to push PLC onto consumers.There is nothing theoretical about:
• The fact that QLC only offers 30% more density, despite having a lot more voltage states than a 30% increase (diminished returns)
• QLC drives have not been priced low enough to make them worthwhile
• PLC is going to be worse
• Economy of scale is actively working against consumer value, by inflating the price of TLC
Failure of trolling noted.
FunBunny2 - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
"There is nothing theoretical about:"the fact that, what, no more than a handful make NAND. if they choose, whether through collusion or simultaneous profit-seeking, to sell only QLC and PLC what are you going to do about it? invoke the Defense Production Act to force SLC production at reduced prices? unfettered capitalism never favours the consumer.
Oxford Guy - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link
What am I going to do about it? Tell the truth, aka whinge.Beaver M. - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
I heard reports that WD SSDs cant do Windows sleep, which is a reason why Samsung did their own NVMe driver. Can you confirm that?Endgame124 - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
What this review really says is we need less TLC drives, and either flat out all SLC drives or a new revision of the Optaine 905P.Oxford Guy - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
SLC shouldn't be so drastically faster than TLC if MLC is not.So, if the data does indeed suggest what you're saying then it suggests that Samsung's implementation of MLC is lacking. MLC should be between SLC and TLC in performance, not 'dead' (equivalent to TLC).
MS - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
I appreciate the idle power numbers but they are really meaningless. Why don't you show sequential and random write power consumption which should be in the 25 to 40 W range. Until the drive starts heating up and the performance collapses as a consequence of thermal throttling. Anything else is, er, marketing collateral at bestBilly Tallis - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
What are you talking about? The power numbers reported here are for the drive itself, not the whole computer system's wall power consumption. Even the Optane SSD included in this review doesn't hit 25W, let alone 40W. M.2 drives rarely break 8W. SATA SSD usually stay under 5W. And the idle power numbers are not at all meaningless; consumer SSDs spend the overwhelming majority of their time idle.kumataro - Thursday, March 25, 2021 - link
So the SN850 is faster when it is brand new and has > 80% free space... once the drive starts to get full the Samsung 980 Pro has better performance?529th - Sunday, April 11, 2021 - link
Just picked up a SN850, and the model number is WDBAPY0010BNC, however it was advertised as the model in this review, the WDS100T1X0E. What did I just buy?I've seen articles about companies changing part revisions that are not as fast as the ones sent out for reviews.
mrplus - Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - link
Hi, guys, lame question – does this pci-4 thing means that I need a new pci-4-friendly controller to use it? Or it’s just completely internal matter and any - for example - pci-friendly-usb3.2 external case will work with it?Billy Tallis - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
PCIe is backwards-compatible: the host and the device will negotiate the highest link speed and widest lane count that are supported by both end points. So a Gen4 SSD in a motherboard that only supports Gen3 will work fine, limited to Gen3 speeds. A Gen4 SSD in a USB to NVMe enclosure that only provides PCIe Gen3 x2 to the drive will likewise be compatible, but with severely crippled performance.tech345 - Monday, April 19, 2021 - link
really it was great to use for everyonekensiko - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
I'm pleased by the fact that you still include the Optane.PCIe 4.0 impresses but regarding endurance, 600TB is not impressive, so I'll keep my Optane for now. Too bad MLC is dead.
Wrathier - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link
I just bought one to use with my new Z690 build. Going to be awesome. I already have a 2TB Nvme m.2 Samsung 960 PRO I of course will keep as well, but will use this as "main drive". Seems awesome.