The MyDigitalSSD SBX SSD Review: NVMe On The Cheap

AnandTech 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.