The MyDigitalSSD SBX SSD Review: NVMe On The Cheap
by Billy Tallis on May 1, 2018 8:05 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, 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. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The average data rates from the MyDigitalSSD SBX on The Destroyer are faster than most but not all SATA SSDs of comparable capacity. As expected, the SBX is one of the slowest NVMe SSDs, but it does outperform the Intel SSD 600p.
Average and 99th percentile latencies from the SBX on The Destroyer are generally higher than for other NVMe SSDs, but it isn't a drastic outlier like a DRAMless SATA drive. The larger two capacities actually beat several competitors for 99th percentile latency.
The smaller two capacities of the MyDigitalSSD SBX have slightly better average read latency than the Intel SSD 760p. Otherwise, average read and write latencies are higher than most other NVMe SSDs but are still better than SATA drives.
The MyDigitalSSD SBX has reasonable 99th percentile read and write latency scores—especially the 512GB model. The smaller capacities have much higher tail latencies, but are not as bad as the Intel 760p.
Energy usage by the MyDigitalSSD SBX on The Destroyer varies widely between the different capacities. The 512GB SBX uses very little energy by NVMe standards, but the smaller drives take much longer to complete the test and use substantially more total energy by the time they finish.
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Mikewind Dale - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
I'd like to see a low performance M.2 PCIe to USB enclosure just to make it easier to format and transfer drives. E.g., suppose you have a laptop with one M.2, and you want to upgrade. You'll have to make a disk image from M.2 PCIe, copy it to a SATA USB drive, then install the new M.2 drive and copy the image. You need a third drive in between. It'd be nice to copy straight from one M.2 drive to the other.dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Well, as far as that goes, it would be nice if laptop makers would replace the 3.5" bay with two m.2 slots so it wouldn't be so much trouble for those very things. However, it seems laptop makers have their heads about as far up their behinds as is possible.peevee - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
You will have zero benefit from NVMe on USB 3.0. Maybe USB 3.2.Samus - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Is there some reason the WD Black NVMe results are missing from all your charts, when you just did a review of that drive?Seems kind of weird considering it's this drives natural competitor.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The new WD Black is more of a high-end NVMe drive in both price and performance. I didn't want to make the graphs too large, and I only have 1TB samples of the WD Black so it wouldn't be a fair comparison against the 512GB and smaller SBX.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
seems that Crucial MX500 is a VERY good drive taking everything into accountprice is "reasonable" performance is also "reasonable" given the price.
to each their own, I kind of like the good ol 2.5" sata drive, they do not seem to have any throttle from heat related crud that so many of the u2 or m2 (whatever version you want to call them)
as pretty much all mobo put them really close to massive heat producing parts such as cpu or gpu and those stupid heatshields 9/10 are useless as crud ^.^
the other side of NVME based is not only does your motherboard have to support such (from OS as well as mobo point of view) seems there are many of them out there that are not as plug and play as they should be considering the cost IMO.
I am ok with a corvette over a station wagon (i.e SSD vs HDD) I do not have need to pay that extra $$$$$$ for a ferrari (that seems that given the proper workload are obviously WAY faster, but, run of the mill race, SSD are already fast enough and much more costly than a standard HDD to begin with)
moheban79 - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link
Anyone know if these nvme drives come with legacy option roms?peevee - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Looks to me the drives were not in NVMe mode. Random performance should not be so much lower than SATA drives.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
NVMe is not a "mode", and random performance is dependent on the drive, not the interface (up to a point)dgingeri - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
Actually, yes, NVMe is a mode. The other mode is AHCI under PCIe, and all NVMe drives can operate in AHCI mode, and yes it does hurt random performance because the instruction parallelism allowed isn't nearly as wide under AHCI mode.https://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/testing-sata-e...