The Inland Performance Plus 2TB SSD Review: Phison's E18 NVMe Controller Tested
by Billy Tallis on May 13, 2021 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
Our AnandTech Storage Bench tests are traces (recordings) of real-world IO patterns that are replayed onto the drives under test. The Destroyer is the longest and most difficult phase of our consumer SSD test suite. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Inland Performance Plus delivers excellent overall performance on The Destroyer, but the WD Black SN850 beats it on almost every subscore. The best result from the E18 drive is with write latency, where it is the clear leader in average latency and a close second in 99th percentile latency. The energy efficiency of the Inland Performance Plus is poor—common for high-end drives, but Samsung and especially WD are better here.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
The ATSB Heavy test is much shorter overall than The Destroyer, but is still fairly write-intensive. We run this test twice: first on a mostly-empty drive, and again on a completely full drive to show the worst-case performance.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
On the Heavy test, the Inland Performance Plus delivers great performance, though again it falls short of the WD Black SN850. It's also only a small improvement over the Phison E16-based Silicon Power US70, and several of the best Gen3 drives end up with better performance when testing against a full drive. The Performance Plus is also one of the most power-hungry drives on this test, again requiring almost 50% more energy to finish the tests than the WD Black SN850.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
The ATSB Light test represents ordinary everyday usage that doesn't put much strain on a SSD. Low queue depths, short bursts of IO and a short overall test duration mean this should be easy for any SSD. But running it a second time on a full drive shows how even storage-light workloads can be affected by SSD performance degradation.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Inland Performance Plus manages a first-place finish for overall performance on the Light test, but it's only a hair faster than the Phison E16 drive or the WD Black SN850—and the WD Black has significantly better performance on the full-drive test run. The Performance Plus also doesn't quite manage first place on most of the latency subscores, and it shows a larger full-drive penalty to the write latency scores than most other high-end drives. The Inland Performance Plus is also in last place for energy usage.
PCMark 10 Storage Benchmarks
The PCMark 10 Storage benchmarks are IO trace based tests similar to our own ATSB tests. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
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| Full System Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
| Quick System Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
| Data Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
The Inland Performance Plus provides decent but not chart-topping performance on the PCMark 10 Storage tests. For the Full System Drive and Quick System Drive tests it is not able to outperform some of the faster Silicon Motion-based NVMe drives that usually provide lower random read latency than Phison drives. On the Data Drive test that is more focused on sequential IO, several older Phison drives provide better performance, suggesting that the firmware for the E18 is tuned more for general real-world performance rather than exclusively trying to maximize simple benchmark scores—but we'd still like to see a controller this powerful consistently beating its predecessors on all kinds of workloads.
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mode_13h - Sunday, May 16, 2021 - link
> somewhere around 2.4 it was re-written in C (C++ didn't yet exist). the first time> I fired up 2.4 1-2-3 (on a 640K 8088) what had been instant screen updates were now slow
Early C compilers weren't good at optimizations. Also, 16-bit x86 had that mess with NEAR and FAR pointers. Basically, you needed a segment + offset (each 16 bits) to address beyond 64k. Where the ASM had probably been doing a lot of memory optimizations to pack lots of stuff into a single segment, maybe the C version just used FAR pointers and heap-allocated memory, for most things.
Back in the day, I preferred 320x200 VGA resolution over 320x240, even though the latter had square pixels, precisely because I could fit the former in a single 64k segment.
> it appears to be the fact that the constant push and pull between node shrink, more transistors,
> phatter cpu, more memory on the one hand and software bloat on the other doesn't balance out.
There are also software optimizations happening at the same time as hardware. Compilers are already on a different planet, compared to those days! Even in the mid-90's, I knew a guy in the MIPS compiler group at SGI who said they considered it a bug if you could write assembly that was faster than the equivalent C.
Moving on from C, Just-in-Time compilation in browsers had been the norm for more than a decade. And performance-intensive software like games and video codecs often get special attention paid to finding and optimizing their performance hot spots.
However, we have more and higher-level languages than ever before, and you do see people using them for things they'd have previously done with C or C++. Then again, C lacks good support for abstract data structures, which means that either it uses worse algorithms, it's more buggy, or it takes a lot longer to write (sometimes all 3).
Even as progress on hardware performance continues to slow, I think software optimizations will continue. That doesn't mean everything will get uniformly faster, as some key software is already close to the theoretical limits of the hardware. It does mean that the overall experience should still improve, a bit.
Reflex - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
This is a common misconception about XP. Yes it 'feels' faster. The main reason for that is it lies about what it's doing. It has no concept of large caches on drives, network cards and CPU's so the GUI shows tasks as complete before the cache is flushed. A large part of the perceived sluggishness of Vista was the major update to dialog boxes like file copy to ensure that when a job was reported as done, it was done. Reporting complete when a cache is not flushed is a way to end up with corrupted data.GeoffreyA - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
You're right. Excellent point. I forgot about Vista's improved accuracy in reporting. Having said that, I'd still say XP, being a simpler, more primitive OS, was lighter on the whole. Also, the DWM doubtless added a lot more overhead than GDI.Spunjji - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
@GeoffreyA - DWM is undoubtedly heavier than GDI, but GDI was pretty buggy and slow in its own ways. I still remember the revelation of moving a window around at speed in Vista and having it just move over things, rather than leaving behind big white gaps to be filled in at leisure 😅GeoffreyA - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
"rather than leaving behind big white gaps to be filled in at leisure"Oh, yes, when we were youngsters, we used to consider it a mark of a fast computer to move a window about with ease. Most left those delayed-action white gaps in their wake.
Spunjji - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
I see these comments a lot, but having used every Windows OS from 3.11 onwards, I would take "bloated and sluggish" Windows 10 over anything that preceded it - whether it's the half-DOS configuration nightmare of 95, the blue-screen happiness of 98, XP's inability to recognise now-basic hardware like SATA and WiFi controllers, or 7's inability to boot on anything other than the exact hardware on which it was installed.It's all a lovely happy dream when it's abstracted behind a VM, but setting up 95 on actual hardware was (and remains) an extended nightmare of CDs, floppy disks and low-level tweaking.
GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Spunjji, I generally agree and am happy using Windows 10; and I say this as one who used to hate it. Truth is, 10 is Windows all the way through, along with many improvements (especially the copy dialog and Task Manager of 8). I wouldn't say it's bloated. It's lighter, relatively speaking, than Vista; and concerning its appearance, I'm glad they got rid of Aero. Easier on the eye. Actually, it looks closer to XP. Of course, it's not as "snappy" as XP, but the culprit there is Vista. And we'd hope that loss in speed was made up for in the security department. Personally, though, my favourite was XP. I think it'll go down in history as a classic.Spunjji - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
@GeoffreyA - XP was a revelation on launch, and it does retain some charm to this day. I think it wore thin for me simply because it outstayed its welcome; I had the unenviable experience of hacking it onto new systems for business customers long after everyone with an ounce of sanity had already migrated to Windows 7. XP definitely has more of a sense of immediacy in use than 10, but then 10 boots like it has a rocket strapped to it!GeoffreyA - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Agreed; and as for booting, full marks for Windows 10! It's fantastic in that regard. After XP, 10 is my second favourite, actually (after tweaking, that is).mode_13h - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
> 10 boots like it has a rocket strapped to it!Isn't it really just like coming out of hibernation, unless you force it to do a full boot?