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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damianrobertjones - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Opens Amazon/ebay and types 'Toshiba XG5'. Nothing found. Oh well you've lost a possible sale Toshiba! Well done. (U.K.)mapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Get a 960 Pro instead, far better buy. My 512GB was only 249 UKP new.Or if you want to save some pennies, look for an SM951, SM961 or the older 950 Pro.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The XG5 is an OEM drive. They're selling every single one they can manufacture to companies like Dell. We'll see a retail counterpart eventually, once their BiCS3 manufacturing volume ramps up.wazoo42 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
What happened to the performance consistency tests? Those were one of the primary reasons I went to Anand for SSD reviews.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
They'll be back eventually. I'm currently keeping the testbed busy around the clock with all the new drives that have arrived recently, plus re-testing older drives on the new 2017 test suite. The steady-state performance consistency test was the least realistic benchmark on the old 2015 test suite, so its replacement in the 2017 suite is my lowest priority. Once the testbed has some idle time, I'll go back and run the steady-state performance consistency tests on everything.In the meantime, the ATSB tests do have consistency scores in the form of 99th percentile latency, including broken down by reads and writes. I'm also considering adding some form of consistency score to the synthetic benchmarks that are already in this review.