The Inland Performance Plus 2TB SSD Review: Phison's E18 NVMe Controller Tested
by Billy Tallis on May 13, 2021 8:00 AM ESTMixed IO Performance
For details on our mixed IO tests, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
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| Mixed Random IO | Throughput | Power | Efficiency | ||||||
| Mixed Sequential IO | Throughput | Power | Efficiency | ||||||
The Inland Performance Plus with the Phison E18 controller sets a new record for performance on our mixed sequential IO test, and it provides pretty good power efficiency on that test. It has somewhat disappointing performance on the mixed random IO test, with a few Gen3 TLC drives delivering better performance, and most of the 8-channel TLC drives delivering better efficiency.
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| Mixed Random IO | |||||||||
| Mixed Sequential IO | |||||||||
On the sequential IO test, the Inland Performance Plus is a bit slow to start when the workload is very read-heavy, but quickly ramps up to about 6GB/s. Like many drives, performance is low to begin with as these drives aren't exactly optimized for juggling several parallel streams of sequential reads. Once the workload has shifted to include a significant amount of writes, caching makes things easier for the drives to manage and performance tends to improve. The E18 controller makes that transition early and with as big a performance gain as any drive, and things hold relatively steady around 6GB/s through the rest of the test.
On the random IO test, the Performance Plus is less consistent. After the typical initial performance drop that comes from adding the first bit of writes to the mix, the Performance Plus generally keeps slowing down but there's quite a bit of variability. The higher power consumption during phases where performance is lower indicates that there's background work to clean up the SLC cache interfering with benchmark performance. Things settle down during the last third of the test.
Power Management Features
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
For many NVMe SSDs, the closely related matter of thermal management can also be important. M.2 SSDs can concentrate a lot of power in a very small space. They may also be used in locations with high ambient temperatures and poor cooling, such as tucked under a GPU on a desktop motherboard, or in a poorly-ventilated notebook.
| Inland Performance Plus 2TB NVMe Power and Thermal Management Features |
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| Controller | Phison E18 | ||
| Firmware | EIFM21.1 | ||
| NVMe Version |
Feature | Status | |
| 1.0 | Number of operational (active) power states | 3 | |
| 1.1 | Number of non-operational (idle) power states | 2 | |
| Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) | Supported | ||
| 1.2 | Warning Temperature | 70 °C | |
| Critical Temperature | 110 °C | ||
| 1.3 | Host Controlled Thermal Management | Supported | |
| Non-Operational Power State Permissive Mode | Supported | ||
The Phison E18 as used in the Inland Performance Plus supports the full range of NVMe power and thermal management features, but with the somewhat implausible 110 °C critical temperature threshold. The deepest idle power state also claims only a 30% reduction in power at the cost of much higher entry and exit latencies. Fortunately, as shown below the lowest idle power state saves a lot more power than indicated by this firmware information.
| Inland Performance Plus 2TB NVMe Power States |
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| Controller | Phison E18 | ||||
| Firmware | EIFM21.1 | ||||
| Power State |
Maximum Power |
Active/Idle | Entry Latency |
Exit Latency |
|
| PS 0 | 8.8 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 1 | 7.1 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 2 | 5.2 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 3 | 62 mW | Idle | 2 ms | 2 ms | |
| PS 4 | 44 mW | Idle | 25 ms | 25 ms | |
Note that the above tables reflect only the information provided by the drive to the OS. The power and latency numbers are often very conservative estimates, but they are what the OS uses to determine which idle states to use and how long to wait before dropping to a deeper idle state.
Idle Power Measurement
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks, and depending on which NVMe driver is in use. Additionally, there are multiple degrees of PCIe link power savings possible through Active State Power Management (APSM).
We report three idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. Our Desktop Idle number represents what can usually be expected from a desktop system that is configured to enable SATA link power management, PCIe ASPM and NVMe APST, but where the lowest PCIe L1.2 link power states are not available. The Laptop Idle number represents the maximum power savings possible with all the NVMe and PCIe power management features in use—usually the default for a battery-powered system but rarely achievable on a desktop even after changing BIOS and OS settings. Since we don't have a way to enable SATA DevSleep on any of our testbeds, SATA drives are omitted from the Laptop Idle charts.
The active idle power from the E18 drive is well under 1W, a clear improvement over other Gen4 drives and many of the top-performing Gen3 drives (note: all Gen4 drives are operating at Gen3 speeds during this test, because we can't get idle power management working properly on our Gen4 testbeds; on a Gen4 system we expect active idle power to be a bit higher). The desktop idle almost exactly matches what the drive claims, and lowest laptop idle power is great at just 3mW.
Unfortunately, wake-up times are a bit slow: wake-up from the desktop idle state is already 44ms and wake-up from the laptop idle state is a whopping 371ms, which is enough to cause noticeable delays if this power state is used frequently by the OS.
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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?