The Corsair Neutron NX500 (400GB) PCIe SSD Review: Big Card, Big Pricetag
by Billy Tallis on August 16, 2017 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Corsair Neutron NX500 delivers a better average data rate on the Heavy test than the other Phison drives, especially when the test is run on a full drive, a case that the Patriot Hellfire handles particularly badly. The other MLC-based NVMe SSDs all perform better than the NX500.
The average latency provided by the NX500 on the Heavy test is only modestly slower than the competing drives using the same NAND but different controllers. Against the other Phison drives that differ primarily in firmware, the NX500 is the fastest. When considering 99th percentile latencies the Patriot Hellfire slightly outperforms the NX500 when the test is run on an empty drive, and the overall spread of scores between the Phison drives and the fastest drives in this bunch is a bit smaller.
The average read latency of the NX500 on the Heavy test is pretty good: only about 20-30µs slower than the fastest 15nm MLC drive, and Samsung's 950 PRO is only a little bit faster than that. The average write latency of the NX500 and the other Phison E7 drives is more than twice as high than the best 3D NAND SSDs, and substantially worse than the other 15nm MLC drives.
As with the average latencies, the 99th percentile read latency of the NX500 is pretty good while on the write side it's slower than average, but not horrible. The Zotac SONIX is the slowest of the three Phison drives, but also the one with the least performance drop when the Heavy test is run on a full drive.
The NX500 on the Heavy test again comes in last place for power efficiency, with the Zotac SONIX only slightly beating it. The Patriot Hellfire's power consumption score is good by the standards of planar NAND PCIe SSDs.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
45 Comments
View All Comments
Exodite - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I'm looking forward to the day I can read a SSD review and not come away thinking "...or just buy a Samsung".Not that I begrudge them top spot, they've clearly put the work into it, but as consumers we'd be better served if at least /someone/ else were competing on, like, any metric.
Ej24 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Crucial used to be in the game back when Sata SSD's were king, then they just never released another MLC drive, nor any consumer nvme drives. So yeah, Samsung is definitely unchallenged now. Though that Toshiba xg5 kept up well in the destroyer benchmark.coolhardware - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Agreed. Samsung has been at the top for so long it is just boring.Kudos to Samsung though for making some fast and reliable SSDs at a reasonable price point.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I think we got more chances to see GloFo AMD branded SSD better than the 850 than waiting for the known competitors.Samus - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Crucial is still in the game. They just can't compete with Samsung on performance. Nobody can.But in my experience, Crucial/Micron drives are slightly more reliable that Samsung (obviously excusing the flawed 840\840 EVO) especially in regard to power loss scenarios. That's why you continue to see more Micron drives in enterprise and business PC's than any other brand (except perhaps Sandisk, in which case they are often the same Marvell controller so the differentiating factor comes down to firmware and in-flight data protection)
It's really hard to consider anything else when looking at "new" drives. Samsung and Crucial/Micron are really at the top. Sandisk is decent, but not cost competitive at the high end, and OCZ's has had some good drives for the price lately, but why gamble?
And if you are looking for cheap MLC drives, older Intel drives are still the best bet. I still have a soft spot for SSD320's and SSD710's if you can live with the 3Gbps interface they are bulletproof and incredibly cheap on fleabay.
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
"That's why you continue to see more Micron drives in enterprise and business PC's than any other brand (except perhaps Sandisk, in which case they are often the same Marvell controller so the differentiating factor comes down to firmware and in-flight data protection)"Maybe it's the particular vendor, but the Dell and Cisco equipment I deal with in both the server and desktop space use mainly Samsung, with some Toshiba XG series on the client side.
tipoo - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
It's maybe ironic the only one challenging them on SSD speed isn't selling SSDs outside their own systems, i.e the last custom Apple SSD controller.tipoo - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Actually I'd love to see that put through this suite.extide - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Well at least I can be satisfied knowing I made a good investment buying my 1TB 960 EVO -- heck I think I paid around $400 - $450 or so for it -- cheaper than the 800GB version of this. It makes reviews boring but at the same time it sucks spending good money on something and then seeing something cheaper and faster released shortly after, although I do agree that we need to see some competition.beginner99 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Yeah. Perfromance is one thing but price another and this drive is clearly overpriced. If you want me to use a pcie-card ssd you better deliver something special but this fails.What's missing is a strady-state bench. First the large spare area gets praised but then no steady-state data? IMHO that is usually the most important aspect of the review, the actual performance the drive will have not some "marketing" numbers.