The Inland Performance Plus 2TB SSD Review: Phison's E18 NVMe Controller Tested
by Billy Tallis on May 13, 2021 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
Our AnandTech Storage Bench tests are traces (recordings) of real-world IO patterns that are replayed onto the drives under test. The Destroyer is the longest and most difficult phase of our consumer SSD test suite. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
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| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Inland Performance Plus delivers excellent overall performance on The Destroyer, but the WD Black SN850 beats it on almost every subscore. The best result from the E18 drive is with write latency, where it is the clear leader in average latency and a close second in 99th percentile latency. The energy efficiency of the Inland Performance Plus is poor—common for high-end drives, but Samsung and especially WD are better here.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
The ATSB Heavy test is much shorter overall than The Destroyer, but is still fairly write-intensive. We run this test twice: first on a mostly-empty drive, and again on a completely full drive to show the worst-case performance.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
On the Heavy test, the Inland Performance Plus delivers great performance, though again it falls short of the WD Black SN850. It's also only a small improvement over the Phison E16-based Silicon Power US70, and several of the best Gen3 drives end up with better performance when testing against a full drive. The Performance Plus is also one of the most power-hungry drives on this test, again requiring almost 50% more energy to finish the tests than the WD Black SN850.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
The ATSB Light test represents ordinary everyday usage that doesn't put much strain on a SSD. Low queue depths, short bursts of IO and a short overall test duration mean this should be easy for any SSD. But running it a second time on a full drive shows how even storage-light workloads can be affected by SSD performance degradation.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Inland Performance Plus manages a first-place finish for overall performance on the Light test, but it's only a hair faster than the Phison E16 drive or the WD Black SN850—and the WD Black has significantly better performance on the full-drive test run. The Performance Plus also doesn't quite manage first place on most of the latency subscores, and it shows a larger full-drive penalty to the write latency scores than most other high-end drives. The Inland Performance Plus is also in last place for energy usage.
PCMark 10 Storage Benchmarks
The PCMark 10 Storage benchmarks are IO trace based tests similar to our own ATSB tests. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
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| Full System Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
| Quick System Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
| Data Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
The Inland Performance Plus provides decent but not chart-topping performance on the PCMark 10 Storage tests. For the Full System Drive and Quick System Drive tests it is not able to outperform some of the faster Silicon Motion-based NVMe drives that usually provide lower random read latency than Phison drives. On the Data Drive test that is more focused on sequential IO, several older Phison drives provide better performance, suggesting that the firmware for the E18 is tuned more for general real-world performance rather than exclusively trying to maximize simple benchmark scores—but we'd still like to see a controller this powerful consistently beating its predecessors on all kinds of workloads.
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DominionSeraph - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
Try an optimized OS like XP. There's really no difference.philehidiot - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
I do actually have windows 95 installed as a VM, running off an SSD. If you want to really understand how bloated and sluggish Windows 10 is, try using Windows 95 and see how far they have regressed in pursuit of looking pretty.GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Even XP feels faster, on an older computer, than 10. Vista is where the sluggishness crept in.GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Also, software in general has become more sluggish, owing to excessive use of abstractions, frameworks, and modern languages.jospoortvliet - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Software has become vastly more complex as users demand more and more features and slick interfaces. Also, platforms evolve faster and more need to be supported. Developers have less time per feature so more abstractions and higher level languages are needed. You can't write code in a browser that is as efficient as good old assembly as it has to run everywhere and even if you could you would lose to a competitor who wrote more features with less developers....So yeah, you are right but it is a trend that is hard to reverse.
GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Quite true, but one can't help feeling a pang of regret when looking at today's applications vs. those rare C/C++ Win32 ones that, as they say, just fly.FunBunny2 - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
"Quite true, but one can't help feeling a pang of regret when looking at today's applications vs. those rare C/C++ Win32 ones that, as they say, just fly."true fact. I used 1-2-3 pretty much from version 1, which is X86 assembler as was DOS. somewhere around 2.4 it was re-written in C (C++ didn't yet exist). the first time I fired up 2.4 1-2-3 (on a 640K 8088) what had been instant screen updates were now slow as molasses up hill in winter; you could see individual elements change, one by one.
it appears to be the fact that the constant push and pull between node shrink, more transistors, phatter cpu, more memory on the one hand and software bloat on the other doesn't balance out. I've always been sceptical of ever-increasing number of 'tiers' in the memory hierarchy paired with load-store architectures. may haps persistent memory will give us a true Single Level Storage that's more performant than just virtual storage/memory. have to work out a new version of transaction control, though.
GeoffreyA - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
Well, soon they'll need some big changes, when the quantum limits set by Nature are hit. As for the software, yes, it tends to get slower as time goes by. Any gains in hardware are quickly reversed. I think there's been a view inculcated against C++, instigated by Java perhaps, that it's not safe, it's bad, and so one needs to use a better, more modern language; or if C++, do things in an excessive object-oriented way, away from the lighter C sort of style. As in all of life, even "good" programming principles can be taken too far. So moderation is best.FunBunny2 - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
"if C++, do things in an excessive object-oriented way, away from the lighter C sort of style."C has been described as the universal assembler. pretty much true, esp. if you limit the description to the bare language w/o the many libraries. a C program can be blazingly fast, if the code treats the machine as a Control Program would. but that's how the PC World was nearly extinguished in the late 80s and early 90s by viruses of all kinds. I'm among those who spent more time than I wanted, editing with Norton Disk Doctor. not an era I miss.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, May 16, 2021 - link
Oh, yes, programs were doing their own thing, till OS's began to clamp down. As years went by, security got more attention too, as it should, and newer languages guaranteed different types of safety. An important point in this era where so much of our information is handled electronically. Or portability made easier, or maintenance.