Micron 176L 3D NAND Delivers Record UFD Consistency

Essential’s flash-based storage lineup has had a particular concentrate on inner SSDs, with a spread of choices catering to each mainstream and energy customers. On the moveable SSD entrance, the corporate’s X6 and X8 Moveable SSDs have been enticing price range choices for the mainstream customers. Nonetheless, these drives use QLC and are usually not totally appropriate for energy customers (equivalent to content material creators) who require writing huge quantities of information as rapidly as doable.

The corporate launched two new merchandise within the PSSD class in July 2023 – the USB 3.2 Gen 2 X9 Professional, and the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 X10 Professional. These 1 GBps and a pair of GBps-class drives include a Sort-C port and a Sort-C to Sort-C cable (Sort-A adapter bought individually). The efficiency specs of those two merchandise point out suitability for energy customers – for the primary time, the corporate is quoting write speeds for his or her PSSDs within the advertising and marketing materials.

Essential sampled the 2TB model of the X9 Professional for evaluation, and we put it by way of our rigorous direct-attached check suite. This evaluation takes an in depth have a look at the efficiency and worth proposition of the PSSD, with a specific concentrate on the way it stacks up in opposition to the present gamers within the phase.

Introduction and Product Impressions

Flash know-how has seen fast developments lately (equivalent to the event of 3D NAND and enhancements in TLC reliability). These have been accompanied by the looks of sooner host interfaces for exterior units. Collectively, they’ve contributed to bus-powered direct-attached storage units rising in each storage capability and speeds. The Sort-C customary has additionally achieved widespread acceptance within the shopper market. Protocols equivalent to USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 / USB4 and Thunderbolt driving on high of the Sort-C connector have enabled the introduction of palm-sized flash-based storage units able to delivering 2GBps+ speeds. The ten Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface has change into ubiquitous in moder techniques and has emerged because the candy spot for mainstream customers.

One of many major challenges with high-speed storage units is the thermal side. Bridge-based options with a number of protocol conversion chips are likely to dissipate extra energy as a result of further elements. Excessive-performance moveable SSDs previously have had no possibility however to make use of them – first, with SATA bridges, after which with NVMe bridges. The introduction of native UFD controllers able to hitting 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps from Phison and Silicon Movement has opened up but an alternative choice on this class. The Essential X6, geared up with the Phison U17, was reviewed in August 2021 and was one of many first retail merchandise to surpass the SATA speeds barrier by hitting 800 MBps speeds with out utilizing a NVMe bridge. Across the identical time, Silicon Movement’s SM2320 powered the Kingston XS2000 to twenty Gbps speeds and not using a bridge within the center.

Merchandise based mostly on Silicon Movement’s SM2320 have gained a variety of shopper mindshare as a result of they’ve usually been capable of hit the interface pace limits for sequential accesses in each the ten Gbps and 20 Gbps classes. Nonetheless, consistency was a difficulty because the preliminary wave of merchandise used Micron’s 96L 3D TLC or BiCS 4 / BiCS 5 (as much as 112L) 3D TLC NAND. The introduction of sooner flash has since allowed moveable SSDs (PSSDs) based mostly on the native UFD controllers to hit increased speeds and keep them even in direct-to-TLC eventualities.

The X9 Professional we’re on this evaluation is a 38g 65mm x 50mm USB 3.2 Gen 2 PSSD made from anodized aluminum. It features a lanyard gap (with the LED close to the opening, quite than close to the Sort-C port) and a rubberized soft-touch base for cover in opposition to bumps. The perimeters are barely recessed for higher traction throughout dealing with. It’s IP55 rated, and drop-proof as much as 7.5′. The packaging is minimal – a brief USB 3.2 Gen 2 Sort-C to Sort-C cable and a person information along with the primary unit.

The Silicon Movement SM2320 native controller and Micron’s 176L 3D TLC NAND packages are seen within the board. Every bundle seems to have eight 1 Tbit dies.

CrystalDiskInfo supplies a fast overview of the capabilities of the interior storage system. TRIM and NCQ are usually not seen within the options listing, although we now have seen these obtainable in different PSSDs based mostly on the Silicon Movement SM2320. Essential indicated that TRIM help might be enabled within the subsequent firmware replace. We’ll see within the subsequent part that native command queuing is lively within the PSSD, and all S.M.A.R.T options equivalent to temperature learn outs labored properly.

S.M.A.R.T Passthrough – CrystalDiskInfo
Essential X9 Professional 2TBSDP G-DRIVE 2TBSamsung T7 Protect 2TBSDP PRO-G40 2TB [ASM2342]SDP G-DRIVE ArmorLock 2TB	SDP G-DRIVE 2TBSamsung T7 Protect 2TBSDP PRO-G40 2TB [ASM2342]SDP G-DRIVE ArmorLock 2TBEssential X9 Professional 2TB

The desk under presents a comparative view of the specs of the totally different 2TB 1 GBps-class PSSDs introduced on this evaluation.

Previous to wanting on the benchmark numbers, energy consumption, and thermal resolution effectiveness, an outline of the testbed setup and analysis methodology is offered.

Testbed Setup and Analysis Methodology

Direct-attached storage units (together with thumb drives) are evaluated utilizing the Quartz Canyon NUC (primarily, the Xeon / ECC model of the Ghost Canyon NUC) configured with 2x 16GB DDR4-2667 ECC SODIMMs and a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD – the IM2P33E8 1TB from ADATA.

Essentially the most enticing side of the Quartz Canyon NUC is the presence of two PCIe slots (electrically, x16 and x4) for add-in playing cards. Within the absence of a discrete GPU – for which there isn’t a want in a DAS testbed – each slots can be found. Actually, we additionally added a spare SanDisk Excessive PRO M.2 NVMe SSD to the CPU direct-attached M.2 22110 slot within the baseboard with a view to keep away from DMI bottlenecks when evaluating Thunderbolt 3 units. This nonetheless permits for 2 add-in playing cards working at x8 (x16 electrical) and x4 (x4 electrical). For the reason that Quartz Canyon NUC would not have a local USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port, Silverstone’s SST-ECU06 add-in card was put in within the x4 slot. All non-Thunderbolt units are examined utilizing the Sort-C port enabled by the SST-ECU06.

The specs of the testbed are summarized within the desk under:

The testbed {hardware} is just one phase of the analysis. Over the previous few years, the standard direct-attached storage workloads for reminiscence playing cards have additionally advanced. Excessive bit-rate 4K movies at 60fps have change into fairly widespread, and 8K movies are beginning to make an look. Sport set up sizes have additionally grown steadily even in moveable recreation consoles, due to excessive decision textures and paintings. Holding these in thoughts, our analysis scheme for moveable SSDs and UFDs entails a number of workloads that are described intimately within the corresponding sections.

• Artificial workloads utilizing CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
• Actual-world entry traces utilizing PCMark 10’s storage benchmark
• Customized robocopy workloads reflective of typical DAS utilization
• Sequential write stress check

Within the subsequent couple of sections, we now have an summary of the efficiency of the 2 PNY PSSDs in these benchmarks. Previous to offering concluding remarks, we now have some observations on the drives’ energy consumption numbers and thermal resolution additionally.