Silicon Motion SM2256 SSD Controller Preview: TLC for Everyone
by Kristian Vättö on June 17, 2015 8:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- TLC
- Silicon Motion
- SM2256
Random Read Performance
For full details of how we conduct our Iometer tests, please refer to this article.
Random read performance has never been Silicon Motion's biggest strength and it actually slightly decreases with the new SM2256 controller, although that's most likely due to the slower TLC NAND.
Power also goes up quite significantly, but compared to other drive it's still relatively low -- just not SM2246EN low.
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Queue depth scaling behavior seems to be similar to the SM2246EN, although at a higher power consumption. The scaling could be a little more aggressive because especially the QD4 and QD8 scores can't match the competition.
Random Write Performance
Random write performance isn't too good as the SMI 2256 turns out to be the slowest of the bunch. I wonder how big of a difference another manufacturer's TLC NAND would make, but we should find that out once the retail drives ship in the next couple of months.
Power efficiency is pretty poor given that performance is low, but power consumption is average.
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It's obvious that TLC NAND limits the performance because there's practically almost no scaling at all with the queue depth. The good news is that low QD performance is pretty decent -- it's the high QD operations that suffer the most from TLC NAND, but those are very rare in typical client workloads.
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Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
The benchmarks seems very lacklustre and similar to much older controllers/SSDs. I know it's still probably not optimized, but unless SSDs using this can REALLY get the price down, I don't see why people won't just go with the older SSDs like. Heck, even new SSDs like the 850 EVO can be had at a very competitive price.watzupken - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Having experimented with a couple of value SSDs running the older SM2246EN controller, I feel they are not too bad for the price. For most users, I don't think they will run into much performance issues with these drives and will still enjoy a better user experience than running a mechanical drive. If you are getting a new SSD running an older controller, its likely you won't find it cheaper cause its older.NeatOman - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Thats true, but paired with a i3 or anything AMD in which such a small margin when the Systems controller (like in AMD's AM3+'s 990 chipset) is the bottleneck or simply the processing power like with a i3 or lower.And i feel the 850 EVO 120gb at $85 is still much more expensive than a SSD you can pick up with almost the same day to day performance for $55. It's like comparing a desktop i5 to a desktop i7 IMO.
Taneli - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Everything you write here is just complete garbage.leexgx - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link
i agreeEthos Evoss - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
the new Plextor SSD M6V has Silicon Motion SMI-2246Sejong - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
TLC for everyone....this is not a welcome. :(SunLord - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
TLC is nice for low end low use scenarios but that about it.Flunk - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
This would have to be really cheap to be interesting.Hulk - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
My thought exactly.