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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teldar - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
This seems ridiculous? OS queries are typically non sequential. This limits performance of everything. It's not like it's unknown that the next real step should be combined storage and ram, something that optane was supposed to do.Billy Tallis - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
> OS queries are typically non sequential.To quantify this a bit, when I had Windows Explorer tally up the disk usage of my photos folders, about 35% of the IOs were sequential, and just over half at QD1. That should have been operating mostly on file metadata, rather than sequentially reading the actual file contents.
Valantar - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
Synthetic? What? The main ATSB test suite here consists of 100% real-world application traces. Sure, there are synthetics too, but the reviews are pretty explicit in pointing out that the value of those tests are mostly academic, and rather serve to illustrate why we see the differences we do in the ATSB tests.mode_13h - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
Please ignore the troll.Synthetics are useful for testing manufacturer claims, exploring corner cases, boundary conditions, and the outer performance envelope.
Real-world benchmarks give users some idea of what they can expect and show how the characteristics revealed in the synthetics relate to practical user experience.
Without reviews like the ones at Anandtech, manufacturers would be trying to get away with a lot more sketchy stuff, I fear, and making even more outlandish claims.
jabber - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
I have to say the upgrade from SSD to NVMe was one of the biggest disappointments in my computing life. There is a law of diminishing returns in day to day performance once you reach and go past 500MBps.mode_13h - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
Do you use antivirus? On the windows PC I use for work, they hav it so bogged down with security software that I might as well be using a hard drive!On Linux, I saw a marked difference between SATA and NVMe.
Tomatotech - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
It depends on your OS & system. On my MacBooks, I saw a large difference going from an old but adequate 2013-era 128GB SSD to a 1TB 2019 NVMe. The new NVME was literally 3x faster in every way than the SSD and it made a huge difference to the laptop. Felt like new again.Like most things in tech, it takes around a doubling in speed for the difference to be noticeable to the user.
mode_13h - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
> Until Microsoft unshackles Windows from the magnetic Hard disk eraPlease explain what you mean by this. Also, not all of us are using Windows.
> I suppose these reviews and their hairsplitting synthetic benchmarks get clicks.
If you feel it's not relevant to you, then please *don't* click. And spare us your whining, as well!
I'm happy to have this review. I appreciate seeing the detailed performance analysis, as well as how much light it sheds on SSDs, their inner workings, and the overall SSD industry.
FunBunny2 - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
"Also, not all of us are using Windows."so far as AT Management goes, yes we are. how much ink is devoted to anything else, aka linux?
Billy Tallis - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
All of the synthetic tests in our SSD reviews are using Linux.