AnandTech 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.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Data Rate)

The ADATA XPG SX950 is the slowest MLC SSD in this group, going by its average data rate on The Destroyer, while the similarly-equipped Crucial BX300 is the second-fastest SATA drive in the half-TB capacity class.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Latency)

ADATA has a latency problem on The Destroyer. The SX950's average latency is much worse than any other MLC SSD, and the 99th percentile latency as bad as the TLC-based SU800, which was already an extreme outlier.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Read Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Write Latency)

Splitting the average latency up by read and write operations, it's clear that the SX950's troubles are mostly on the write side, though the average read latency is also more typical of a TLC SSD than one with 3D MLC.

ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Read Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Write Latency)

The 99th percentile read latency of the ADATA SX950 is not much worse than other 3D MLC SSDs, but the 99th percentile write latency on The Destroyer is unusually high at over 81ms. It appears that the SX950 is being quite aggressive with its SLC caching, leading to a serious backlog when it is finally forced to perform garbage collection. The BX300 avoids this by using relatively small fixed-size SLC caches.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Power)

Given the mediocre data rate and poor QoS indicating a lot of background work, it's not too surprising to see that the SX950's energy usage on The Destroyer is substantially higher than the Crucial BX300 and most other 3D NAND SSDs. The SX950 does shave 25% off the energy usage of the TLC-based ADATA SU800, but Crucial still does much better with the same controller.

Introduction AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
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  • CheapSushi - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link

    Next year with QLC it'll change. SATAIII is will still be useful for bulk drive SSDs coming. Yeah sure, if you're JUST a gamer and want only ONE drive for everything, it's a no-brainer on what direction to go. If you want just TWO drives, similar. But if you have more than that basic setup, SATAIII QLC SSDs are going to be perfect for bulk storage, while you have your OS and other main programs/software on an NVMe drive(s).
  • MrSpadge - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    Billy, you need to be less honest with your titles if you want people to actually read your review ;)
  • RaistlinZ - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    "In Search of Adequate"
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link

    Years later and still nothing can compete with the 850 EVO 500GB
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    This is how the exchange should go down when storage techs come up with a new SSD design and want approval to proceed:

    Tech: "We've designed a new SSD!"
    Manager: "Is it better than the 850 EVO?"
    Tech: "Umm, no."
    Manager: "Go away."

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