The Team Group MP34 512GB SSD Review: Refining Phison's NVMe Workhorse
by Billy Tallis on May 15, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Toshiba
- Phison
- M.2
- NVMe
- BiCS
- 3D TLC
- Team Group
- PS5012-E12
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The new firmware that the Team Group MP34 brings leads to small but clear improvements to the average data rate on the Heavy test. This is true for both empty-drive and full-drive test runs, so Phison hasn't made the kind of serious tradeoffs that Silicon Motion did moving from the SM2262 to SM2262EN which has the best peak performance but regressed significantly in worst-case full drive performance.
Average latency for the Team MP34 on the Heavy test is basically unchanged when the test is run on an empty drive, but slightly improved for the full-drive test run. The 99th percentile latency scores show the opposite effect: modest improvement for the easier empty-drive test run, but slightly worse for the full-drive test runs. The full-drive QoS is still better than Silicon Motion's drives offer.
Average read latencies for the MP34 are slightly improved over the old firmware for both empty and full drive test runs, while average write latencies show a slight regression in empty-drive performance in exchange for a larger improvement in full-drive performance.
The 99th percentile read latencies for the MP34 on the Heavy test are significantly improved over the older firmware, bringing the 512B MP34's scores closer to most 1TB NVMe drives than to the average 512GB NVMe drive. The changes to 99th percentile write latency are a mixed bag, with empty-drive performance improving slightly but full-drive performance getting worse, and the latter is where the 1TB drives tend to have a big advantage over 512GB drives to begin with.
Setting aside the energy usage results for the drive with RGB LEDs, the general power efficiency picture for the Phison E12 hasn't changed much with the new firmware. It's still one of the more efficient high-end NVMe controllers under load, but the entry-level NVMe drives and SATA drives are generally more efficient.
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ssd-user - Sunday, May 19, 2019 - link
I see that you are still in denial about how it was you who couldn't read diagrams. I'd also like to point out that I'm actually trying to be the change I want to see exactly by asking for the sorting to be fixed.Because the sorting clearly is wrong. I pointed out a very stark example of when a much worse drive sorts above the better ones.
Also, your lack of reading comprehension is showing in how you think this is only about TRIM. As I said, this is about disk full situations. And even with TRIM, the disk may simply be close to full. Not everybody buys an SSD that is twice as big as it needs to be.
I was also pointing out that even if your drive isn't full, it may well show the full behavior in reality.
Sorry for not being your ideal party buddy.
peevee - Monday, May 20, 2019 - link
Who uses their SSDs full to the brim and in sustained write mode? Honestly, that scenario is not even realistic for properly managed DB servers, let alone in client systems where the only wait time which actually happens is during system boot/application launch/data load on up to 80% full (in Anandtech-speak "empty" system).Client writes are all cached first and the write itself happens in background, the user does not have to wait anything.
AT does not even test this scenario properly, even their "Light" test is WAY too write-heavy for that.
A synthetic which would reflect that is something like "64kb random read" (runs are 16 clusters=64k on NTFS, and most DLLs are close to that size).
MDD1963 - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
660P from Intel is $109 for 1 TB....; even though it is 'only' 2x PCI-e lanes capable, it is still more than 'snappy' for that sort of cost/capacity ratio....peevee - Monday, May 20, 2019 - link
Why do they even use x4 PCIe when they cannot even saturate x2? Really, peak read of 1.4GB/s is pathetic.DyneCorp - Monday, June 17, 2019 - link
"The write endurance ratings are still competitive with high-end drives that offer five year warranties"The MP34 has over twice the endurance of any SSD utilizing the SM2262 with Micron NAND. I apologize, but I'm not understanding what you mean by "still competitive". Seems as if Phison is outclassing the competition in certain regards. A small sacrifice in performance for exceptionally more endurance.
DyneCorp - Monday, June 17, 2019 - link
Metrics*, not regards ha.crimson117 - Friday, April 24, 2020 - link
Looks like the new MP34's offer a 5-year warranty:256GB - TM8FP4256G0C101
512GB - TM8FP4512G0C101
1TB - TM8FP4001T0C101
https://www.teamgroupinc.com/en/product/mp34
https://www.teamgroupinc.com/en/catalog/act.php?ac...