The Patriot Hellfire M.2 480GB Review: Phison NVMe Tested
by Billy Tallis on February 10, 2017 8:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Patriot Hellfire's average data rate on The Destroyer is slightly better than the fastest SATA SSD, but it is clearly the slowest MLC NVMe SSD in this bunch, and half the speed of Samsung's best.
The Patriot Hellfire squanders some of the latency advantages of NVMe, with an average service time that is sitting in the middle of the gap between SATA SSDs and other MLC NVMe SSDs.
The Patriot Hellfire ties with the aging Intel SSD 750 for the number of latency outliers beyond 100ms, but at the 10ms level it is only barely ahead of the best SATA drive and has almost three times as many outliers as the next slowest NVMe SSD.
As with most NVMe SSDs, the Patriot Hellfire burns substantially more energy over the course of The Destroyer than any good SATA SSD. Samsung remains the only company to deliver a PCIe SSD that is on par with SATA SSDs for this power usage metric.
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Magichands8 - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
The problem is that there's nothing cheap about these. In fact, price per GB for SSDs seems to be going up even for the 'just good enough' crowd! And after all these years capacities are still a joke. To me, those are much bigger concerns than the name given to the drive. But we're going to have to put up with it for quite a while by simply not buying anything. Companies are going to keep doing this as there's apparently a large part of the buying public who are determined to throw pearls before swine on overpriced and low capacity SSDs. At least Patriot has done SOMETHING about the performance aspect.Murloc - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
you're wrong, I can now buy something double the size and with better performance at the same price I bought my 840 evo.MR_Roberto - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
ehh? tell me what product that is.. i want to buy it xDphexac - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
Now, that is one crappy SSD.jjj - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
You guys should use these traces to measure power consumption in CPU reviews.There is way too much focus on "max load". Guess AT does have some more relevant tests for laptop reviews but in CPU reviews, the power section is tragic.
Billy Tallis - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
Unfortunately, these traces are just playing back the I/O, not actually re-running the whole application. The CPU load they present is trivial.jjj - Sunday, February 12, 2017 - link
Hmm so that can distort the SSD perf tests a bit for workloads that are CPU heavy.Maybe a dedicated article would be interesting. Even more so when you get Xpoint drives, next year i guess for proper capacities.
Guess the SSD power tests could factor in perf and CPU utilization for extra accuracy.
Billy Tallis - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
The distortion should be minimal. Recording the traces in the first place incurred very little overhead. The trace doesn't perfectly capture the dependencies between operations, but the playback does preserve the ordering and queue depths and relative timing, except that long disk idle periods are cut short. I'll cover this in detail in when I launch the 2017 test suite.BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
Your efforts are appreciated.jjj - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
Just to be clear, i was thinking the CPU becoming a bottleneck in some situations and that there might be significant differences in CPU load per unit of perf between SSDs that could lead to significant differences in real usage.