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 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus has a significantly higher average data rate on The Destroyer than its predecessor, or any other TLC-based SSD we've ever tested. It's about 15% slower overall than the Intel Optane SSD 900P that costs about four times as much per GB. The smallest 250GB 970 EVO Plus is little less than half as fast as the 1TB model, but that still puts it above the 1TB HP EX920 and anything else in the 250GB capacity class.

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

The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the 970 EVO Plus are a clear improvement over its predecessors, but it doesn't come out ahead of all the competition. The Phison E12-based Corsair MP510 outperforms the 970 EVO Plus on both metrics, and the WD Black SN750 has better 99th percentile latency.

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

The 970 EVO Plus has a faster average read latency on The Destroyer than any of its competition, but the Corsair MP510 still holds the top spot for average write latency thanks to its very fast write cache. Among the slightly different mix of smaller drives, the 250GB 970 EVO Plus has a much more commanding lead in average write latency than average read latency.

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

The 1TB 970 EVO Plus has better 99th percentile read and write latency scores than its predecessor, but it can't entirely catch up to the best competitors we've seen in recent months. The smaller drives have vastly higher 99th percentile latencies, but the 250GB 970 EVO Plus comes out ahead among that group with a small write QoS lead and a larger read QoS lead.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Power)

The 1TB 970 EVO Plus uses slightly less energy to complete The Destroyer than its predecessor. However, both capacities are still very inefficient compared to the best drives in their capacity class. At 1TB there are options that are both very efficient and very fast, but the only particularly efficient small NVMe drive we've tested is the entry-level MyDigitalSSD SBX.

SLC Cache Sizes & SYSmark 2018 AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
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  • ikjadoon - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    Ah, wait. The 970 PRO isn't actually on Bench. I don't think it's been reviewed, right?
  • Kvaern1 - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    Completely not exciting. Don't care about a slight speed increase which no consumer is going to notice in the their daily use anyway. All that matters in the consumer NAND space at this point is bringing prices down, which is very unlikely to happen in a business with no real competition left, read cartel.
  • heffeque - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    Definitely would love to see 4 and above TB SSD drives at HDD prices (or less). Tech isn't there yet I guess.
  • piroroadkill - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link

    Yeah, you're spot on. To be 100% honest, even a good ol' SATA Samsung 830 is good enough. I've used systems with fast nVME drives, as with "older" SATA SSDs, and I can pretty much say that the difference really isn't that noticeable in most use cases. But price is. Capacity is.
  • stoatwblr - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link

    You might not notice the slowness of 830s, but I do. (840s are better, 850s are great)

    It all depends on what you're doing.
  • Mikewind Dale - Saturday, February 16, 2019 - link

    "is bringing prices down"

    Two years ago, I bought a 512 GB Kingston KC400 SATA drive for $160. Today, I can buy a 1 TB Intel 660p QLC NVMe for $125, or a 1TB WD Blue SATA for $125.

    So yeah, I'm pretty sure prices are falling. Maybe they're not falling 50% overnight, but falling 50% over two years is pretty darned nice.
  • RMSe17 - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    If not too difficult, would it be possible to add 970 Pro 1TB results for comparison?
  • kgardas - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    Random read @ Q1 and Q1/2/4 is still nearly the same like on SATA drives (MX500 as reference). Would be great if NVMe vendors would be able to push that to the speed of random write which is noticeable different from SATA. Anybody knows what's holding them back from it?
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    Writes can be buffered in DRAM, but reads expose the real latency of NAND.
  • catavalon21 - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link

    Nice to see you pop in from time to time. You certainly burned the midnight oil on many an SSD review back in the day.

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