ADATA XPG SX930 (120GB, 240GB & 480GB) SSD Review: JMicron JMF670H Debuts
by Kristian Vättö on July 16, 2015 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines. For full details of the test, please refer to the this article.
In our Heavy trace the SX930 is an average performer. To be frank, the JMF670H doesn't seem to have enough juice to go head to head with the 850 EVO and BX100, which is a shame because it leaves price as the only competitive advantage ADATA can have.
Surprisingly the 240GB model experiences more >10ms IOs in our Heavy trace than in The Destroyer. I would speculate this is due to the SLC cache filling up because the Heavy trace is more peak IO focused, whereas The Destroyer is built more for sustained performance, so it may be that in The Destroyer the controller just bypasses the SLC cache at some point and writes directly to MLC. In any case, optimizations are certainly needed to improve performance.
Power consumption, on the other hand, is relatively good. It's not BX100-level, but compared to some other high-end SSDs the SX930 has a more efficient power profile.
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bill.rookard - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
It is more of a power-user scenario. I have a pretty fast desktop (i5-4670k, 16GB ram, Gigabyte Gaming-5 mobo) paired with an older (!) Samsung 830 128Gb boot drive. The computer, once you get past the POST, boots in seconds. Your average user would never notice a faster boot, since it's so bloody quick already.DIYEyal - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
SSDs are far more than just fast boot.frenchy_2001 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
As Anand used to repeat in most of its SSD tests, there is very little difference for typical client usage between SSDs. There are order of magnitudes between SSDs and HDDs (particularly useful for random access latencies), but once that jump is made, there is very little difference for client usage.Just check the "Storage Bench Light Latency" graphs. This is the ranking for typical client usage and most SSDs are in the same range.
Only enterprises and power users will really benefit from PCIe/NVMe storage. For the rest of us, any modern SSD is good enough.
Stochastic - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
To me this raises the question of what's next in client computing. Any half-decent PC today with an SSD already excels at most consumer tasks--web browsing, office applications, light photo editing, 1080p video, etc. Compute intensive tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing are being pushed to the cloud. Gamers have faster GPUs and next-generation displays (OLED, 4K, wide-gamut, adaptive V-sync) to look forward to, but aside from that there's nothing else in the horizon that gets me excited. Maybe VR is the next big thing?Kristian Vättö - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Unified memory architecture (i.e. no more memory and storage, just one type that serves as both) is really the next big thing. We'll likely see something in that front in the early 2020s.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Are you saying a non-volatile technology will replace DRAM in 5 years? How could that possibly happen?Kristian Vättö - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Not replace right away, of course, but in five years time the next generation non-volatile memory (ReRAM, NRAM, MRAM or whatever it ends up being) should start to be in meaningful production volume. Once that happens it will slowly start to replace DRAM and NAND, although that transition may easily take a decade, but some enterprise applications will probably take advantage of a unified memory architecture rather quickly.AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Huh. I haven't heard of all 3 of those. But without even knowing about them, I can say in general it will be damn hard to beat DRAM performance and density/cost. Maybe in 2030.ATC9001 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Is there ever going to be a drive that challenges the EVO for price and performance? It competes with higher end drives, but is nearly the cheapest available...Refuge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Honestly idk...Samsung is very well set up in the SSD space right now, they have their own in house controller that is a very solid performer, and they are completely vertically integrated with some of the best fabs around.