Micron P400m Review (200GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 13, 2013 12:00 AM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
Although random write consistency is an important part of the any enterprise SSD story, read performance is also very important. Here we're looking at 4KB random read performance over a 100% LBA span at a queue depth of 32:
The P400m shows a tremendous increase in performance over the P400e. I'd almost argue that these two drives shouldn't carry such similar names given how differently they perform here. Intel's S3700 manages 22% better random read performance, but if random read performance is really the name of your game then Toshiba's SAS drive has everything else beat.
For the past few years we've been using 4KB random write performance as a measure of how advanced a controller is. Big multi-user (or virtualized) enterprise workloads almost always look fully random at a distance, which is why we use steady state random write performance as a key metric. The results below take hours to generate per drive and are truly an indication of steady state performance for 4KB random writes (100% LBA space):
As far as 2.5" enterprise SATA drives are concerned, Intel's S3700 broke new ground in steady state 4KB random write performance. Micron's P400m isn't too far behind though. Intel maintains a 20% performance advantage, but the P400m puts nearly everything else in our chart to shame. Once again the comparison to the P400e is like night and day.
Sequential Read/Write Speed
Similar to our other Enterprise Iometer tests, queue depths are much higher in our sequential benchmarks. To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 32. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
This is the only area where the P400e manages to slightly outperform the P400m. The margin of victory isn't enough to ever recommend the P400e over the P400m, but it just shows how Micron's focus has shifted between these drives. Intel and Toshiba hold the performance advantage here over Micron, but all of these drives are at least within the same realm of performance.
Switch our focus to writes and the P400m and S3700 are alone at the top. Once again the P400m puts the P400e to shame, its sequential write performance is over 5x that of Micron's previous drive. Intel maintains a 9% performance advantage here.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
I'm not sure what causes it, but periodically when an article posts the Like button is broken and basically "maxes out". I don't know where the 1394 number comes from (not FireWire! Hahaha), but I'll pass the info to John, our web guy, to see if he can do something about it. It was supposed to be fixed....Beenthere - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Tell that to those with the "100 hour crash" syndrome...All of the SSD makers have been rushing half-baked products to market for huge profits from gullible consumers duped by the media. With Smasungs SSD and now PC issues, it's pretty safe to conclude that quite a few of the brand name SSD suppliers are cashing in on half-baked crap.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Was he saying that they never have issues with their SSDs? No, that's what the "more" indicates (more stable than competition, not absolutely, 100% stable all the time).And just because there are issues doesn't mean things are half baked, in my opinion. Everything can have issues, even centuries old technology or stuff they through countless man-hours and money at. I personally owned 3 SSDs (Agility, Vertex2, 840 non-Pro), all working fine to this day. I owned a Samsung laptop, smartphone, tablet, all fine. Am I saying that everything with them is fine? No. But there is no point in being a doom-sayer like you at the moment either.
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Don't mind him, he posts something similar in every SSD related article regardless of make or model.Death666Angel - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Thanks I'll note his name for ignoring in the future :P.JellyRoll - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
The whole thing looks great (with the exception of Anand making some very major flaws listing the design of the unit) until the very end where he essentially says, "buy intel", even though they have nowhere near the features of the P5400m. I am wondering how he came to that conclusion.melgross - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
I don't recall him saying that. He mentioned price performance. This performs somewhat worse than the Intel drive, so he said that if it were less expensive, it would be worth looking at, but that if it were more expensive, then the Intel drive would be a better bet. Since micron's pricing is pretty high, as given, though they told him the pricing was wrong, we don't know the pricing.I think his closing remarks were right on the money, so to speak.
Are you sure you understood what he said?
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
I'm assuming that the endurance rating "DW" is referring to drive-writes a day? Meaning "10DW x 5 years" is ten complete drive writes a day for five years?Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Correct, I will clarify in the table.Take care,
Anand
zeadlots - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Is it just me or do the graphs on the second page feature the Samsung 840pro SSD, but the subsequent graphs all have the Samsung SM825. It was my understanding that the 840pro was top 3 on most tests according to another article of yours. Hoping someone can doublecheck this.