Silicon Motion SM2256 SSD Controller Preview: TLC for Everyone
by Kristian Vättö on June 17, 2015 8:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- TLC
- Silicon Motion
- SM2256
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines. For full details of the test, please refer to the this article.
The performance isn't overwhelming in our Heavy trace either. Again average data rate is decent, but in terms of latency the SMI 2256 is worse than SanDisk's Ultra II and by a fairly significant margin.
The number of >10ms IOs is alarming, unfortunately. MLC drives usually have less than half a percent, whereas the SMI 2256 is close to 6%.
Even though the performance isn't that high, the power consumption is among the highest we've tested. It's not substantially higher compared to competing MLC drives, but compared to e.g. the 850 EVO there is a tremendous difference.
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watzupken - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Looking at the state of the Samsung 840, I am still not convinced with TLC based SSDs. With value in mind, SSD is also walking down the path of cheap but unreliable storage solutions from my opinion. E.g. mechanical drives used to last a very long time, but not now even though they are cheap.leexgx - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link
the problem with 840 and 840 evo is just that its not refreshing the cells when it should be (the data is still retained even if its slow doing it) SSDs problem with retaining data is an issue towards end of life but that happens on all SSDs (more a concern for commercial use then consumer drives)der - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Wow great!RU482 - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
IS THAT....A HAIR?i7 - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Looks like it to me.KAlmquist - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
"OEMs can't price their TLC drives similarly to the MLC ones and expect it to be a good sale."Agreed. If you look at the prices of Samsung's 850 series, it's around $0.90 per GB of nand cells plus a fixed cost of $30. So you can get an MLC model for better performance at $0.45/GB of capacity, or a TLC model with lower performance at $0.30/GB of capacity. If that type of pricing is adopted by other SSD manufacturers, then TLC becomes very tempting; otherwise not so much.
The other thing about the 850 line is that the relatively large cell size associated with 3D Nand appears to have eliminated the problem with data deterioration that we saw on the 840 EVO. So TLC will become more attractive next year when 3D Nand becomes available from other manufacturers.
nwarawa - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
10% my tush. Try 20%+. Considering I can get a good MLC 256GB-class drive like a BX100 right now for around $100, if they can't get a similar TLC drive under $80, I won't even give it a second glace.revanchrist - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
TLC is going to be real cheap. Tigo, a Chinese 3rd-party ssd manufacturer has announced its tlc ssd based on Silicon Motion controller and SK Hynix nand chips last week, available in quantity up to 2TB. They've only disclosed the price of the 240gb model, which is RMB 399, roughly 65 USD. FFS that could translate to 260 USD for a 1TB model OMG.revanchrist - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
The controller is exactly SM2256 and the nand is 16nm 128Gb TLC from SK Hynix.anactoraaron - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
OFF TOPIC: Wow you guys must have had some serious issues with the LG G4 for it to be 2+ weeks past release and still no review.I'm guessing you were about to publish the issues you have had with the device (missed taps/unresponsive screen, slow charging/heat, lag/stutter, etc) and basically not recommend anyone purchase it and you were 'advised' by LG to not publish this until they have had a chance to fix those issues, which according to Android Central will be in the next 3-4 weeks. I just can't recall a review of a flagship device that wasn't out within 2 weeks of release (unless it was a Sony device since they won't comp anything to you guys to review).
I don't see the point of waiting, because even with the issues I personally have (unresponsive screen/lag/stutter) the G4 is still a solid device.
This isn't a knock on you guys - you do probably the most unbiased and thorough reviews. The delay on this review is just starting to smell a bit to me.