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Toshiba OCZ VX500 512 GB

W1zzard

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OCZ's new VX500 SSD is built around a Toshiba controller paired with Toshiba 15 nanometer MLC flash chips. The drive offers excellent performance at even better pricing, making it a great candidate if you want to stay away from TLC drives, but don't want to break the bank.

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bug

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I don't know, that drive doesn't look so hot in Anandtech's view.
 
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Very nice product for its speed and price. Nice review as usual @W1zzard :toast:
 
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wow had to go digging for cons, nice. Wish there was a 2:1 on the 1tb pricing compared with the 512 but that's always where they nail you.
I don't know, that drive doesn't look so hot in Anandtech's view.
they used windows 8.1 and their own custom tests which apparently favor the 2 year old and economy model Samsung 850 EVO. Hardly a good indicator of accuracy.
 
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what the hell is going on with the MS Office installation and the 950 PRO :wtf:

 

W1zzard

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Both PCIe NVMe drives are affected, no idea why. This is 100% reproducable
 
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Both PCIe NVMe drives are affected, no idea why. This is 100% reproducable
can you guys test the new Intel 600p NVMe ?
 
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Mistake in the last paragraph of the conclusion, "Another option could be the Crucial BX200 since it uses MLC..."
The BX200 is a planar TLC drive, not MLC.
 

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I think we've reached the point where there is going to be no noticeable difference in performance on any current SATA based SSD, they are all pretty much maxing out the the SATA connector.
 
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All SSDs have hit a wall in real-world performance.
 

W1zzard

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Mistake in the last paragraph of the conclusion, "Another option could be the Crucial BX200 since it uses MLC..."
The BX200 is a planar TLC drive, not MLC.
Oh wow you are right of course .. my bad .. somehow I completely forgot that fact. fixed!
 

bug

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I think we've reached the point where there is going to be no noticeable difference in performance on any current SATA based SSD, they are all pretty much maxing out the the SATA connector.
Only when it comes to sequential speeds. Random access has a lot of room to improve, but as I have noted above, it looks like it's limited by the flash technology itself.
 

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Only when it comes to sequential speeds. Random access has a lot of room to improve, but as I have noted above, it looks like it's limited by the flash technology itself.

I don't believe random access has any significant room to improve on SATA.
 

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NVMe protocol needs to find its way into a sata connector alresdy....
 

bug

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I don't believe random access has any significant room to improve on SATA.

Why? Is there something inherent to SATA that limit how low latencies can go?

NVMe protocol needs to find its way into a sata connector alresdy....

See above. If there's an inherent SATA limitation, NVMe would be pretty pointless. But afaik there were never plans to talk NVMe over SATA.
 
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cdawall

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See above. If there's an inherent SATA limitation, NVMe would be pretty pointless. But afaik there were never plans to talk NVMe over SATA.

Yes number of instructions being able to be sent across is the limitation. Look into nvme a little more it is just a protocol.
 

bug

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Yes number of instructions being able to be sent across is the limitation. Look into nvme a little more it is just a protocol.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying SATA can't send enough commands, but using NVMe over SATA will somehow avoid that limitation?
 

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I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying SATA can't send enough commands, but using NVMe over SATA will somehow avoid that limitation?

Current SATA controllers only support AHCI. Basically, it only allows processing of a single command to the drive at a time. This was fine for hard drives, which could only really handle reading or writing a single command at a time. NVMe, which is really NVMHCI on the PCI-Express bus, is designed for solid state media, which can handle multiple read and write commands at the same time.

So with current SATA controllers and SATA interface we currently have, we pretty much hit the limit with random access. The limiting factor is the AHCI protocol that the SATA controllers use, not necessarily the SATA interface itself. I'm actually betting that SATA IV will actually be the same maximum 6Gb/s, but implement the NVMHCI protocol instead of AHCI, allowing for much greater random access speeds using the SATA interface. But as long as SATA sticks with AHCI, that is the inherent something that limits how low latencies can go.
 

bug

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Current SATA controllers only support AHCI. Basically, it only allows processing of a single command to the drive at a time. This was fine for hard drives, which could only really handle reading or writing a single command at a time. NVMe, which is really NVMHCI on the PCI-Express bus, is designed for solid state media, which can handle multiple read and write commands at the same time.

So with current SATA controllers and SATA interface we currently have, we pretty much hit the limit with random access. The limiting factor is the AHCI protocol that the SATA controllers use, not necessarily the SATA interface itself. I'm actually betting that SATA IV will actually be the same maximum 6Gb/s, but implement the NVMHCI protocol instead of AHCI, allowing for much greater random access speeds over SATA. But as long as SATA sticks with AHCI, that is the inherent something that limits how low latencies can go.
Ok that makes sense. Because my original question was whether that something that inherently limits SATA's ability to sustain random access. The answer is SATA is fine, the bottleneck is AHCI.
And then we look at PCIe drives that do use NVMe and see the random performance isn't that much better. It's better, but not by much. Hence my conclusion the limitation is now somewhere in the flash memory itself (or maybe controllers).
 

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Ok that makes sense. Because my original question was whether that something that inherently limits SATA's ability to sustain random access. The answer is SATA is fine, the bottleneck is AHCI.
And then we look at PCIe drives that do use NVMe and see the random performance isn't that much better. It's better, but not by much. Hence my conclusion the limitation is now somewhere in the flash memory itself (or maybe controllers).

Protocols and controllers limit random access. The new Samsung 961's show what a good controller and NVMe can do, their random 4k is higher than some drives peak transfer.
 
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what the hell is going on with the MS Office installation and the 950 PRO :wtf:
Both drives are nvme as W1zzard noted; perhaps the native nvme driver is being used which forces FUA? If .NET framework is used during Office installation with Force Unit Access enabled, the queued performance rates can drop wildly. Try running AS SSD (.NET base) on a NVMe drive with the native Win10 nvme driver. Yikes.
 

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Ok that makes sense. Because my original question was whether that something that inherently limits SATA's ability to sustain random access. The answer is SATA is fine, the bottleneck is AHCI.

No, the answer is SATA's reliance on AHCI is what limits SATA's ability to sustain random access. SATA is not fine, it needs to be updated to support newer protocols. That has to be done at a hardware level, with new controllers that use the newer protocol.

And then we look at PCIe drives that do use NVMe and see the random performance isn't that much better. It's better, but not by much. Hence my conclusion the limitation is now somewhere in the flash memory itself (or maybe controllers).

Doubling the random access performance, or more, is a lot more than "not much better".
 

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Doubling the random access performance, or more, is a lot more than "not much better".

I haven't noticed any doubling. Maybe I need to look at more reviews?
 

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I haven't noticed any doubling. Maybe I need to look at more reviews?

Samsung SM961



For reference an 850 PRO gets 30-40 and 80-95 for 4K
 
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