The Corsair Neutron NX500 (400GB) PCIe SSD Review: Big Card, Big Pricetag
by Billy Tallis on August 16, 2017 10:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
The active idle power consumption of the NX500 is clearly higher than the other two Phison E7 drives, most likely due to the extra DRAM on the NX500. Idle power saving modes are still broken with the combination of this testbed and the Phison E7, but at least the NX500 isn't drawing as much power as the Patriot Hellfire did. Given the intended audience, it is unlikely that NX500 users would even attempt to use the low power modes.
With no drive-level sleep state to wake up from, the idle wake-up latency of the NX500 is the minimal time it takes to switch the PCIe link back to full power.
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Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The ATSB Heavy and Light tests include data from runs on a full drive, and The Destroyer writes more than enough data to put this drive into steady-state. Synthetic benchmarks of steady-state performance would not be more representative of real-world usage. Client drives do not get hammered with constant writes. I will eventually add some steady-state tests back into the test suite, but they will not be and never have been the most important aspect of a client drive review. They're useful to study how the drive handles garbage collection under pressure, but the impact that has on real-world performance is minimal.qlum - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
The only place I wouldn't go for samsung is when you want to use a cheap 120gb ssd. At that point the cheapest samsung drives are just too expensive.Vorl - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
did I miss something big, besides the card? This while a good review, is a very uninteresting product that just wastes space compared to a 4x m.2 slot.DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
You can put a card form factor drive in an older board without m.2 slots. Unfortunately the underlying Phision controller isn't much faster than older SATA models; making it another underwhelming product.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Even then you can buy a cheap PCI-E x4 to m.2 adapter for like $15. There's no reason for this card to exist at these capacities. If it was 2 or 4TB, maybe, but not 400/800GBmapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Yup, I have a 960 Pro 512GB on an Akasa card on an X79 board, does about 3.5GB/sec in CDM.Pity the review didn't mention the cheaper SM951/SM961, and they really need to get a 960 Pro to round out the data, the one I bought wasn't that much more than the EVO and it's a far better product. I don't like the 960 EVO, it's slower than the 950 Pro most of the time.
r3loaded - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
> Skip to the graphs.> Another SSD that gets pwned by a 960 Evo, nevermind the Pro.
> Write this comment, ignore the rest of the review and close the tab.
creed3020 - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
+1Unfortunately so, wish it wasn't......very disappointing Corsair.
timchen - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
If I am not mistaken, 960 EVO 1 TB can perform quite differently to 500GB... so using the 1TB performance per dollar does not seem very fair to the 400 GB...Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I do wish I had a sample of the 500GB 960 EVO, because performance does generally scale with capacity. But it's pretty safe to assume that at low queue depths and while the SLC cache isn't full, the 500GB 960 EVO will perform similarly enough to the 1TB that it still beats the Phison E7 drives.