The Silicon Motion SM2262EN SSD Controller Preview: Good And Bad Amplified
by Billy Tallis on August 1, 2018 11:45 AM ESTAnandTech 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, 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. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Silicon Motion SM2262EN offers no improvement over the base SM2262 on The Destroyer, with an average data rate that is slightly below the HP EX920. These SMI controllers are providing performance that is well below the current standard for high-end NVMe drives.
The average latency of the SM2262EN is only slightly worse than the HP EX920, but the 99th percentile latency has regressed more significantly into low-end NVMe territory.
The average latency regression is due to degraded read latency, while average write latency has actually improved, though not to the point of being competitive with other high-end NVMe SSDs.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies are both worse for the SM2262EN than for the HP EX920, but the write latency is clearly the bigger problem with a larger overall value and a more significant regression.
The energy usage of the SM2262EN during The Destroyer is a bit higher than for the HP EX920, which already used rather a lot of energy for not delivering high-end performance. The SM2262EN doesn't quite surpass the smallest, slowest SM2262 drive.
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Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
The sustained I/O synthetic tests move far too much data for DRAM caching of user data to have much impact. The burst I/O tests could theoretically benefit from using DRAM as a write cache, but it doesn't look like that's the case based on these results, and I don't think Silicon Motion would really want to add such a complication to their firmware.leexgx - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
don't think any SSD has used the DRAM as cache (only used for PAGE table) i could speed things up a little but your still limited by the NAND speed any way, Writing directly to NAND makes more senseMikewind Dale - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
That drop in performance in the Heavy test, going from empty to full, was horrifying. I'd like to see some additional tests where the drive gets progressively closer to full. At what point does the drive's performance plummet? Is it gradual or sudden?With other drives, it doesn't matter so much. Most of them have approximately (within 10-20%) the same performance when empty or full, so a person using a full drive will still get approximately the same experience no matter how much they use the drive. But the SM2262EN loses about 80%(!!!!) of its performance when full. So it would be important to know how quickly or gradually this loss occurs as the drive fills.
jjj - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Any chance you are going to the Flash Memory Summit? Might be an interesting year.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Yep, we'll be at FMS next week. Tuesday is going to be a very busy day.jjj - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Great, looking forward to your reports!Death666Angel - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
Considering this thing is still in a beta state, I don't think any further investigation into the full state performance is beneficial to us consumers. But if a SM2262EN SSD hits the shelves and is buyable, then a look into different states of fullness and the corresponding performance will be greatly appreciated. :D Good test and SSD controller so far.DigitalFreak - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
I would definitely like to see this with a retail drive.iwod - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
So have we reached peak SSD? If even Optane don't give us any user perceived performance, then surely user would choose larger capacity SSD than 3GB/s vs 2GB/s SSD.Right now we need price to drop faster. 500GB PCI-E SSD with 1GB/s + Speed should be under $100.
rpg1966 - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
"Silicon Motion's second-generation NVMe SSD controllers have all but taken over the consumer NVMe SSD market. Drives like the HP EX920 and ADATA SX8200 currently offer great performance at prices that are far lower than what Samsung and Western Digital are charging for their flagship products."This (kind of) implies that the controller is the biggest cost element of a drive. Does anyone have a rough breakdown of parts costs for a drive like this, i.e. controller, DRAM, NAND, and the board+ancillaries?