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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Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
The benchmarks seems very lacklustre and similar to much older controllers/SSDs. I know it's still probably not optimized, but unless SSDs using this can REALLY get the price down, I don't see why people won't just go with the older SSDs like. Heck, even new SSDs like the 850 EVO can be had at a very competitive price.watzupken - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Having experimented with a couple of value SSDs running the older SM2246EN controller, I feel they are not too bad for the price. For most users, I don't think they will run into much performance issues with these drives and will still enjoy a better user experience than running a mechanical drive. If you are getting a new SSD running an older controller, its likely you won't find it cheaper cause its older.NeatOman - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Thats true, but paired with a i3 or anything AMD in which such a small margin when the Systems controller (like in AMD's AM3+'s 990 chipset) is the bottleneck or simply the processing power like with a i3 or lower.And i feel the 850 EVO 120gb at $85 is still much more expensive than a SSD you can pick up with almost the same day to day performance for $55. It's like comparing a desktop i5 to a desktop i7 IMO.
Taneli - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Everything you write here is just complete garbage.leexgx - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link
i agreeEthos Evoss - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
the new Plextor SSD M6V has Silicon Motion SMI-2246Sejong - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
TLC for everyone....this is not a welcome. :(SunLord - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
TLC is nice for low end low use scenarios but that about it.Flunk - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
This would have to be really cheap to be interesting.Hulk - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
My thought exactly.