The Team Group MP34 512GB SSD Review: Refining Phison's NVMe Workhorse
by Billy Tallis on May 15, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Toshiba
- Phison
- M.2
- NVMe
- BiCS
- 3D TLC
- Team Group
- PS5012-E12
AnandTech 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 new firmware that the Team Group MP34 brings leads to small but clear improvements to the average data rate on the Heavy test. This is true for both empty-drive and full-drive test runs, so Phison hasn't made the kind of serious tradeoffs that Silicon Motion did moving from the SM2262 to SM2262EN which has the best peak performance but regressed significantly in worst-case full drive performance.
Average latency for the Team MP34 on the Heavy test is basically unchanged when the test is run on an empty drive, but slightly improved for the full-drive test run. The 99th percentile latency scores show the opposite effect: modest improvement for the easier empty-drive test run, but slightly worse for the full-drive test runs. The full-drive QoS is still better than Silicon Motion's drives offer.
Average read latencies for the MP34 are slightly improved over the old firmware for both empty and full drive test runs, while average write latencies show a slight regression in empty-drive performance in exchange for a larger improvement in full-drive performance.
The 99th percentile read latencies for the MP34 on the Heavy test are significantly improved over the older firmware, bringing the 512B MP34's scores closer to most 1TB NVMe drives than to the average 512GB NVMe drive. The changes to 99th percentile write latency are a mixed bag, with empty-drive performance improving slightly but full-drive performance getting worse, and the latter is where the 1TB drives tend to have a big advantage over 512GB drives to begin with.
Setting aside the energy usage results for the drive with RGB LEDs, the general power efficiency picture for the Phison E12 hasn't changed much with the new firmware. It's still one of the more efficient high-end NVMe controllers under load, but the entry-level NVMe drives and SATA drives are generally more efficient.
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Samus - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
Why is the WD Black missing from all the benchmarks - even the recently reviewed SN750 is missing?I’m at a loss here, you specifically mentioned it on the first page of the article, along with Samsung, yet included all the Samsung drives...
futrtrubl - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
Last page. "..if we had the chance to test the 500GB WD Black SN750"kobblestown - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
FWIW, I just bought a 480GB Corsair MP510 and the firmware is reported as ECFM12.2. I don't know if it's available for update of older devices though.ssd-user - Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - link
Can you _please_ sort the SSD's by worst-case ("disk full") numbers rather than best-case ones? I generally really like your reviews, but your sorting is simply wrong, and some horribly bad ssd's end up looking much better than they are because of it.Particularly for things like the 99% latency numbers it is inane to sort by the best case, since the whole point is about near-worst-case latencies, and bad controller should simply not be given the benefit of the doubt.
Note that unless you actually trim the ssd, even an empty filesystem will act like a full one, since the ssd doesn't know which parts are used. So as far as the ssd is concerned, it's all full. So the argument that "most people have lots of room on their disk" is quite likely bogus to begin with, but possibly entirely irrelevant even if it were to be true.
Death666Angel - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
They are storted by worst-case, just in reverse. And if you use an SSD without an automatic trim OS, it's kinda on you, isn't it?ssd-user - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
Death666Angel: please learn to read. They are *not* "sorted by worst-case, just in reverse".Look at the "ATSB - Heavy (99th Percentile Latency)" graph, just as an example.
In particular, look at the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB one. Look at how absolutely *HORRIBLE* the latency is for that.
Yet the idiotic and incorrect sorting shows it as the second-best SSD on that list, because the *best-case* latency when the drive is empty is reasonable. But once it gets full, and $
Anybody who thinks that that drive should be second-best on that list is incompetent.
ssd-user - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
Fat-fingered the response. The "and $" should be "and garbage collection happens, latency becomes horrid".Death666Angel - Saturday, May 18, 2019 - link
I still stand by "If you have an OS that uses GC as a valid algorithm, you desever all the crap you brought upon yourself." But have fun being a blast at parties! Learn to read fricking diagrams and stop bitching. Or start being the change you wanna see in the world!leexgx - Saturday, May 18, 2019 - link
the issue is only with the dramless drives when they are above 60-70% full witch you should avoid (the sandisk/WD blue recant controller is cida dramless but it has 10mb of ram on the controller it self witch seems to be enough to mitigate the lack of a full blown dram)ssd-user - Sunday, May 19, 2019 - link
Exactly. The point is that you should avoid those drives.Which is why they shouldn't show up at the top of the charts. They are not top drives, they are the dregs, and they should show up as such.