The SK Hynix Gold S31 SATA SSD Review: Hynix 3D NAND Finally Shows Up
by Billy Tallis on November 13, 2019 12:00 PM ESTAnandTech 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.
The overall performance from the 500GB and 1TB SK Hynix Gold S31 drives on The Destroyer is a bit slower than typical for mainstream SATA drives, but it's not a large gap.
The average latency scores from the S31 on The Destroyer are reasonable, but again slightly behind the other mainstream SATA drives we've tested. The 99th percentile latency scores rank a bit better, and are definitely competitive. The 250GB model's performance is substantially worse than the larger two models.
Both the average read and write latency scores show similar rankings for the S31s, with the 250GB model's latencies are roughly double that of the 500GB model, and the 1TB only slightly faster than the 500GB.
The 250GB S31 turns in the worst 99th percentile read latency score out of this batch of drives, but the 500GB's score is competitive, and the 1TB model's score is at the top of the chart. For 99th percentile write latencies, the three S31s rank much closer together, and the slowest 250GB model is still vastly faster than the DRAMless SSDs.
The 500GB and 1TB models of the SK Hynix Gold S31 turn in very good energy usage scores, while the smaller 250GB model ends up with efficiency that is merely typical for this class.
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bananaforscale - Sunday, November 17, 2019 - link
And PLC will probably suck even more than QLC.netzflickzz - Friday, October 2, 2020 - link
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How about we get some capacity bumps while we are at it too! I’d love to toss a 4TB QLC m.2 SSD in my laptop, one less thing to carry like the portable rust for my extensive Steam library.eek2121 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
Your laptop likely has a 2.5" sata bay. I expect we shot ourselves in the foot with m.2. There is quite a bit less space for the nand and controller, and m.2 drives are harder to cool. I personally had to buy a heatsink for my 970 evo.kpb321 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
At 4tb your drive cost is going to have pretty much linear scaling with the size as the cost of the NAND becomes the dominating factor which is what we see in the pricing chart even for 2.5' drives where space shouldn't be an issue. The 250 gb drives have a higher cost per gb reflecting the costs for the enclosure, the controller and dram, and circuit board. By 512gb or 1tb the cost per gb has become flat. A 4tb M2 drive would be a little bit harder to do than a 2.5' drive but I still think the main limitation is the relatively limited market for 400-500 SSD drives and currently 2.5' drives address more of that market.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Don't confuse M.2, NVME and SATA. There's a difference between protocoll and form factor. And I have no cooling on 2 out of 3 of my desktop M.2 NVME drives, just normal case ventilation for an upper midrange build, and they are fine around 40 to 50°C idle and never above 60°C when doing things (copy, extract, compress). What sort of situation led to your Evo throttling?firewrath9 - Saturday, November 16, 2019 - link
You can fit the exact same controller, nand, and dram on M.2 ssd as you can in a 2.5" one.Have seen the PCB on any recent SSD, 2.5" or M.2?
Besides, I'd rather have a larger battery, lighter/smaller laptop, or better cooling system or a combination of those than a 2.5" bay.
milli - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Always loved the Corsair Neutron. While not giving peak performance, it gave very stable performance. It seems that this legacy is still existing with this controller.jabber - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
I see the moaning comments re. these drives, stagnation, low speeds etc.Then I get handed a customers laptop which still has a 500GB spinner in it and I remember how far from reality some of us have come. You've never had it so good!MenhirMike - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
True, but "You've never had it so good!" has been true for decades. That 500 GB spinner is so much better than a 40 GB spinner from a few years before, and despite that 500 GB spinner being the "never had it so good" of its time, we got bigger, faster, cheaper drives.That doesn't mean we should just be happy with what we've got and stop asking for more :) I want to see 5c/GB as soon as possible, 2 TB/$100 drive, and maybe some 4 TB/$200 drive would be welcome.