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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Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
There are numerous 8-lane enterprise SSDs already.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
e.g. HGST FlashMAX III and HGST Ultrastar SN260 products are eight-lane devices.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Hey look, another SSD that has no reason whatsoever to exist!I don't understand why manufacturers don't, y'know, try to COMPETE with Samsung instead of re-re-releasing the same old, tired, slow controllers with slightly different but ultimately insignificant spins on them.
DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller. That means almost all of the other companies selling drives have to pick and choose between a handful of controllers made by Phison/etc. Until they recover from Samsung's blind siding them and design new higher performing architectures from the ground up none of them have anything in the same performance class. If what happened at the start of the market when Intel's controllers were unbeatable is any indication we should hopefully have competitive designs available in another year or so.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
-- Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller.well, isn't a controller an implementation of physics and math? which is to say, unless something new happens with NAND chips (not just node size or xLC), may haps we've reached the one-true-answer to the controller problem? may be there's just no more there, there.
Samus - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Wow. That was disappointing.RaistlinZ - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Current Newegg Prices:1. 500GB Samsung 960 Pro = $299.99
2. 1TB Samsung 960 Pro = 600.82
The NX500 has no reason to exist. The price needs to be cut in half to make it even REMOTELY attractive.
alpha754293 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I'm surprised you didn't bother comparing it against the Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe NVMe SSD.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I had originally planned to include the 400GB 750, but some of the results from it looked funny and I decided it wasn't worth postponing the review for several days to re-test the 750. That drive's a pain to test, because I have to run each test twice in order to record the power on both the 3.3V and 12V lines, and the performance has to match between the two runs for the results to be valid.alpha754293 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Depending on how you want to tackle/handle it.There are statistical methods available out there that even with noisy data (e.g. high standard deviations) that you can still use it to process data that might otherwise not make sense at first glance, on the surface.
Course, that would also mean that care would need to be taking so that the tests in and of itself are repeatable.
I only mention it because I would be VERY interested to see how this compared to the Intel 750 series.
Thanks.