Performance Consistency

Our performance consistency test explores the extent to which a drive can reliably sustain performance during a long-duration random write test. Specifications for consumer drives typically list peak performance numbers only attainable in ideal conditions. The performance in a worst-case scenario can be drastically different as over the course of a long test drives can run out of spare area, have to start performing garbage collection, and sometimes even reach power or thermal limits.

In addition to an overall decline in performance, a long test can show patterns in how performance varies on shorter timescales. Some drives will exhibit very little variance in performance from second to second, while others will show massive drops in performance during each garbage collection cycle but otherwise maintain good performance, and others show constantly wide variance. If a drive periodically slows to hard drive levels of performance, it may feel slow to use even if its overall average performance is very high.

To maximally stress the drive's controller and force it to perform garbage collection and wear leveling, this test conducts 4kB random writes with a queue depth of 32. The drive is filled before the start of the test, and the test duration is one hour. Any spare area will be exhausted early in the test and by the end of the hour even the largest drives with the most overprovisioning will have reached a steady state. We use the last 400 seconds of the test to score the drive both on steady-state average writes per second and on its performance divided by the standard deviation.

Steady-State 4KB Random Write Performance

The Trion 150 substantially improves steady-state performance over its predecessor. The middle 480GB capacity is once again the best-performing size by a wide margin.

Steady-State 4KB Random Write Consistency

The Trion 150's consistency score has climbed out of the gutter—aided somewhat by the improved average performance, but there's clearly been a major change in behavior for the drive firmware that reduces the variability of write performance. The Trion 150 scores much better than any other budget drive.

IOPS over time
Default
25% Over-Provisioning

After a very short initial burst of high performance due to SLC write caching, the Trion 150 settles into a pattern of decent but broadly variable performance as it burns through the remaining spare area. Once the spare area is exhausted the behavior changes completely and the drive is very steady, transitioning between a handful of discrete performance levels.

Steady-State IOPS over time
Default
25% Over-Provisioning

Looking closer at the steady-state phase, the transitions between performance states are very clear and abrupt, and there are no outliers in either direction. The performance with manual overprovisioning is substantially higher and the consistency is only slightly worse. In either case, the consistency is as good as we could ask for and a big improvement over the earlier Trion 100.

Introduction AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
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  • nathanddrews - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link

    https://youtu.be/iAwagCwJj-g

    I can't speak for DanNeely, but my DVD/Blu-ray server alone is 32TB now (~4TB free after duplication). Other miscellaneous storage: ~10TB. I wouldn't bother converting the video server over to SSDs, but my other devices I certainly will when the price is right. To be honest, my storage needs have slowed a lot in the past year. Once I can start backing up UHD Blu-ray discs, that will change, but not a lot. I'll just replace existing DVD or Blu-ray backups with the UHD versions. There are only a handful of new movies each year that are worth buying anyway IMO.
  • bji - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link

    Jesus man you buy alot of movies. 32 TB is around 640 Blu-Ray backups if my math is correct. At a minimum of $10 per Blu-Ray (which is almost certainly an under-estimate), you're talking $6,400 just in the media alone. 32 TB of SSD is probably peanuts for someone with your budget :)
  • xrror - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link

    RedBox and/or Blockbuster Video. Also many public libraries have movies in their collection. Just saying ;)
  • bji - Sunday, April 3, 2016 - link

    Whatever. Enjoy your hoarding of content you'll likely never watch again just because it feels so good to rip content producers off. Oh and then why don't you come to Anandtech and whine about how expensive the storage is for your ripped off goods. Not you specifically of course, but there are people who do both of these things. Despicable.
  • BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link

    @bji: " Enjoy your hoarding of content you'll likely never watch again just because it feels so good to rip content producers off. Oh and then why don't you come to Anandtech and whine about how expensive the storage is for your ripped off goods."

    Sadly, this is too often the case. While I don't support MPAA / RIAA practices of treating everyone like a criminal, people who do this make it hard for them to trust anyone. In the end, it is the honest consumer that suffers as measures taken by studios to prevent these actions generally only make things more inconvenient for those who don't make a practice of bypassing them. Given that I like my entertainment to be entertaining and not frustrating, I've elected to drop movie watching almost completely until such a time as I enjoy it again. However, that gives no justification to rip them off.
  • bji - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link

    What? A moral viewpoint on the internet? Didn't April Fools pass already? :)
  • mkaibear - Sunday, April 3, 2016 - link

    It's not unreasonable.

    Speaking personally I subscribe to Amazon Prime so I don't buy a lot of TV or movies but I do generally pick up a few each year.

    Supernatural, Bones, Castle, The Flash, Arrow, plus a few miscellaneous TV series, plus maybe five movies per year means I'm racking up thirty to forty Blu-rays per year, and I've got a 3.5 year old so don't get anything like enough time to watch telly compared to what I used to. In a different situation I could easily see myself tripling that! 640 brs is only about 5 years' consumption at that point.
  • BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link

    @bji: "32 TB is around 640 Blu-Ray backups if my math is correct. At a minimum of $10 per Blu-Ray (which is almost certainly an under-estimate), you're talking $6,400 just in the media alone."

    Well he did say:

    @nathanddrews: "... my DVD/Blu-ray server alone is 32TB now (~4TB free after duplication)."

    So its more like 28TB (used) / 2 (duplication) = 14TB or something like 280 Blu-Ray backups by your math. You're talking $2800 at your specified minimum price of $10. Still quite the budget, but less than half of what you stated.

    @bji: "32 TB of SSD is probably peanuts for someone with your budget :)"

    He isn't the one (at least up to this point) complaining about the price of SSDs. He is simply stating a personal use case that uses large amounts of storage, presumably in an attempt to show the people in this thread that there are legitimate reasons someone may need more than just the 256GB SSD storage in their Macbook Pro retina. Certainly such a use case is not the common user, though.

    Another point of interest is that he never stated over what time period he acquired said collection. $280 a year for 10 years is a lot more palatable than $2800 in a single year. That's still more movies than I'll probably watch in my lifetime, but movies aren't my thing. If they were, I'd have to consider that, regardless of my yearly budget, a $230 1TB (rounded) Trion SSD is worth about 23 movies by your stated minimum pricing. To replace his 32TB array (not sure if he uses raid or another form of duplication) would cost about $7360. That's worth more movies than he could theoretically store without duplication (using your stated minimum pricing).
  • Lolimaster - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link

    I got 4x 6TB WD Blacks.

    Movies (BD rips)
    Anime (BD rips)
    Manga
    adult anime manga and mangazines :P
    some popcorn
  • Lolimaster - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link

    +Nintendo DS, 3DS, Wii, PSP, roms and PC games (I delete what i complete, easy to get if want to play them again).

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