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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Light test average data rates don't show any clear improvement from the new firmware used by the Team Group MP34. When the test is run on an empty drive, the overall performance is great for all of the Phison E12 drives we've tested, without much variation between firmware versions or drive capacities. The full drive test runs show a small advantage for the higher-capacity models. Samsung's drives have the highest scores in both cases, and the Silicon Motion SM2262EN provides similar empty-drive performance at the cost of horrible full-drive behavior.
The Team MP34 shows small improvements to both average and 99th percentile latencies compared to the older Phison firmware, but these differences are insignificant compared to those with other hardware: the Phison E12 was already offering great latency by the standards of 512GB drives, and the performance loss when the test is run on a full drive is much less than some of its competition shows.
Phison may have improved both average read and write latencies by a few microseconds with their newer firmware used on the MP34, but the changes are insignificant. What is important is that they didn't make anything worse in pursuit of improvements, in contrast to Silicon Motion's SM2262EN.
The 99th percentile write latencies for the Team MP34 are a bit better in the full-drive case than the Gigabyte Aorus 512GB, but generally speaking even for these lower capacity drives virtually all of the write operations in the Light test go straight to SLC cache with minimal latency. The 99th percentile read latency is also slightly improved, with almost all read operations completed in under 1ms even when the test is run on a full drive.
The Team MP34 and other Phison E12 drives use less energy over the course of the Light test than Samsung's drives and several other high-end NVMe drives, but ADATA's SX8200 Pro comes out ahead of the Phison drives when the test is run on an empty drive. For this test, even the entry-level NVMe drives require more energy than the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD.
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Samus - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
Why is the WD Black missing from all the benchmarks - even the recently reviewed SN750 is missing?I’m at a loss here, you specifically mentioned it on the first page of the article, along with Samsung, yet included all the Samsung drives...
futrtrubl - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
Last page. "..if we had the chance to test the 500GB WD Black SN750"kobblestown - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
FWIW, I just bought a 480GB Corsair MP510 and the firmware is reported as ECFM12.2. I don't know if it's available for update of older devices though.ssd-user - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
Can you _please_ sort the SSD's by worst-case ("disk full") numbers rather than best-case ones? I generally really like your reviews, but your sorting is simply wrong, and some horribly bad ssd's end up looking much better than they are because of it.Particularly for things like the 99% latency numbers it is inane to sort by the best case, since the whole point is about near-worst-case latencies, and bad controller should simply not be given the benefit of the doubt.
Note that unless you actually trim the ssd, even an empty filesystem will act like a full one, since the ssd doesn't know which parts are used. So as far as the ssd is concerned, it's all full. So the argument that "most people have lots of room on their disk" is quite likely bogus to begin with, but possibly entirely irrelevant even if it were to be true.
Death666Angel - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
They are storted by worst-case, just in reverse. And if you use an SSD without an automatic trim OS, it's kinda on you, isn't it?ssd-user - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
Death666Angel: please learn to read. They are *not* "sorted by worst-case, just in reverse".Look at the "ATSB - Heavy (99th Percentile Latency)" graph, just as an example.
In particular, look at the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB one. Look at how absolutely *HORRIBLE* the latency is for that.
Yet the idiotic and incorrect sorting shows it as the second-best SSD on that list, because the *best-case* latency when the drive is empty is reasonable. But once it gets full, and $
Anybody who thinks that that drive should be second-best on that list is incompetent.
ssd-user - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
Fat-fingered the response. The "and $" should be "and garbage collection happens, latency becomes horrid".Death666Angel - Saturday, May 18, 2019 - link
I still stand by "If you have an OS that uses GC as a valid algorithm, you desever all the crap you brought upon yourself." But have fun being a blast at parties! Learn to read fricking diagrams and stop bitching. Or start being the change you wanna see in the world!leexgx - Saturday, May 18, 2019 - link
the issue is only with the dramless drives when they are above 60-70% full witch you should avoid (the sandisk/WD blue recant controller is cida dramless but it has 10mb of ram on the controller it self witch seems to be enough to mitigate the lack of a full blown dram)ssd-user - Sunday, May 19, 2019 - link
Exactly. The point is that you should avoid those drives.Which is why they shouldn't show up at the top of the charts. They are not top drives, they are the dregs, and they should show up as such.