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 and unlike our Iometer tests, 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.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer (Data Rate)

The Destroyer has earned its name here. The 750 EVO is clearly the slowest modern SSD on this test, showing that it is not suitable for sustained intense workloads with a high volume of writes. Almost any other SSD currently on the market will perform better under pressure, including competing TLC drives.

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer (Latency)

The 750 EVO also sets new records for slow responses, with average service times on par with standard hard drive seek times. Though since The Destroyer has an average queue depth of about 5.5, a mechanical hard drive would still be several times worse by this metric. Conversely, the best MLC SSDs are almost ten times quicker than the 750 EVO.

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer (Latency)

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer (Latency)

With over 10% of operations taking more than 10ms, we can't quite refer to them as outliers anymore. At the 100ms threshold, the 750 EVO has twice as many outliers as anything else.

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer (Power)

The substantially higher energy usage of the 750 EVOs is a straightforward consequence of them taking much longer than everything else to complete the test: The 120GB 750 EVO took just over 17 hours to complete this test while the 120GB PNY CS1311 took only 13.5 hours and the 128GB 850 Pro needed only 10 hours.

Performance Consistency AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
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  • Coup27 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link

    SATA is not yesterdays tech.
  • abrowne1993 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link

    More like yesteryear
  • Death666Angel - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link

    So, everyone with perfectly capable CPUs that are barely slower than current tech should upgrade because SATA is old? I'm not disputing that SATA is the older tech, I'm just looking for a more nuanced and realistic view here. If your workload is sufficiently dependant on IO throughput, by all means get those NVMe drives. But implying that a SATA3 device like a 850pro is not going to do the job for a lot of people.... I have a Z87 4770k running at 4.5GHz. I'm not going to upgrade just for the convenience of M.2 PCIe NVMe support. And I won't do so until 6+ core CPUs with comparable IPC and OC abilities get decently priced.
  • Meteor2 - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link

    No, not at all, and no-one said SATA is inadequate. But it is part of the past, just like 486s and dial-up modems.
  • Bleakwise - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link

    No, SATA has a place. You realize a 2.5 SATA drive has about 10x-20x the volume of a NVME drive. No reason you could n't have a 3.5 inch SATA SSD either.

    Thus SATA will always be the go-to for high volume storage. Flash memory isn't going to be shrunk down anytime soon either, it degrades both performance and reliability, so until we get something better than flash SATA is going to be the only place you can get something like a 4TB or 8TB SSD.
  • Bleakwise - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link

    Shinking thing smaller and smaller is also more expensive, and like I said in terms of flash it also degrades performance. It's much cheaper to build a big-fast thing than a small-fast thing.

    There is also the issue of RAID and mechanical drives for mass storage. I can setup a 20TB fakeraid with an SSD write-back cache for under a thousand dollars. Hardware raid would be about 2000$. The NVME version would be about 8000$ to 10000$.
  • Billy Tallis - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link

    There are 2.5" NVMe drives using the U.2 connector to provide the same 4 lanes of PCIe that can be supplied by the M.2 connector.
  • slowdemon21 - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link

    Agree. SATA is the skylake bottleneck
  • ewitte - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link

    I hacked my bios to run a 950 pro in a z87 it was ridiculous to spend so much upgrading from a 4790k.
  • Coup27 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link

    Do you not think there is something wrong with the phrase "consumer grade NVMe 2TB+ SSD" ?

    You could also RAID some SATA 2TB SSD's to give you want you need. I doubt you "really" need all of that space on NVMe, so maybe a 256 or 512GB 950 Pro + some 850 EVO's in RAID would work well, and is available now.

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