Comments Locked

28 Comments

Back to Article

  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    Another high end competitor is always a welcome site. Hopefully it will push prices down further.
  • Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    And that idle power consumption is great. Looks like we have a great SSD for laptops.
  • Amoro - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    Wonder why they didn't use DDR4L?
  • FATCamaro - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    All DDR4 is the same. There are only improvements in LPDDR4 which I haven’t seen anywhere yet
  • III-V - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    DDR4L operates at a lower voltage, and consumes 80% of the power of DDR4. Where LPDDR shines is with standby power, which is far lower than DDR4 and DDR4L.
  • bug77 - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    For laptops, SATA will always be the less power hungry choice.
  • Death666Angel - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    If you can do more tasks in the same amount of time, I think a lot of people will not mind a fractional increase in power consumption. How much of a fraction is the SSD power consumption on modern laptops anyway? LCD should still be #1 over the course of a full battery charge.
  • bug77 - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    It's about idle power. It's higher on PCIe.
    And you can rarely get more things done on a NVMe drive, 4k random reads are only slightly better than AHCI. And 4k random reads is what you do most of the time ;)
  • Lolimaster - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    And unless you want a desktop replacement laptop nvme makes very little sense for 95% of the users (5% being 4k video editiors).
  • bug77 - Friday, July 20, 2018 - link

    There could be that some laptops only have M2 slots for expansion?
  • Tastydirt - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link

    Not necessarily, depending on workload. A drive like this will read/write 4-8x faster than a SATA drive, allowing it to drop back into idle state much faster. This would probably result in lower total power consumption per byte read.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    looks like a solid design to me, no bad results anywhere and optimizing for low latency over peak throughput in consumer scenarios is probably the better choice.
  • takeshi7 - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    I wish they kept the flip chip BGA design of the E7. It just looks cooler with the exposed die.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    Plan on admiring it inside case huh?
  • FATCamaro - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    He’s going to watch all those bits moving around the chip.
  • Alistair - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    A nice new possibility, but like the HP drive surprised me when I opened it, the Phison is double-sided unfortunately. I'd rather not buy Samsung, but Samsung being single-sided is a big plus.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    A big plus for what?
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    compatibility with laptops that don't have enough Z height for a 2 sided m.2 card.
  • romrunning - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    It can also help with the cooling, if the controller is being impacted by higher thermals. The board-facing side may not have enough space to add even a small heatsink. Single-sided M.2 drives can benefit from placing the heatsink on the top side, along with whatever better airflow there may be the top side as well.
  • siuol11 - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link

    I really wish someone besides Samsung would make a "performance" drive with MLC, I'm not interested in using a TLC drive for a windows install. AFAIK there are no direct competitors to Samsung's Pro drives, and the prices have consequently continued to stay high.
  • gglaw - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    new cheap competition is exactly what the market needs. I've posted this before but the pursuit of performance for most of the readers here is pretty much wasted unless i've gotten so insensitive to speed changes I can't tell the difference anymore. I have more computers that I'm embarassed to admit to and more parts than I have time to finish building more to test. SSD's in general I wouldn't be surprised if I've tested more than the whole AT staff literally, and not just running a few hours of the same suites, hundreds of hours through my LAN room. I've had every major SSD chipset released for at least several years and within I'd say the last 2-3 years I can tell absolutely no difference between the cheapest 3D NAND SATA drive and the 970 EVO and ADATA 8200 which is a gem most people haven't even heard of that are among the fastest drives ever produced for consumer use. My slowest drives are the Micron 2TB dirt cheap $250 drives that go on sale every 2 weeks (cheapest per GB drive ever made), a couple Crucial MX 3D NAND drives, a few enterprise Samsung/HP pulls that are actually brand new sold through Newegg outlet, and some Samsung 850 non-pro's. Especially on the Destroyer tests the numbers look dramatically different, but this test is absolutely useless for at least 99% of the users on this site other than the few big organization admins who frequent these comments routinely.

    No one including myself through hundreds of hours through my LAN room have noticed/commented on any speed difference running Twitch/streaming, chat engines, browsers, while doing many hours of OW, WOW, HOTS, and Steam library games. This is about the intensity of use of the vast, vast majority of the public, likely moreso. Now other than my one flagship with about the fastest you can get of every piece, all I go for is cheap $/GB and decent warranty on my SSD's. My current flagship is the top Ryzen2, ADATA 8200 NVME drive (basically same as 970 EVO which is in my Coffee Lake rig), GTX 1080 - and sadly the only noticeable difference is playability on higher graphics settings due to the GTX 1080s on the higher machines. The 16 threaded CPU and turbo SSD's no one can tell is even in the box. And the budget machines running RX 580s, GTX 1070s/1060s, do everything identical to the flagships other than a couple graphics settings needing to be turned down. (All the rigs are also only going at 1440p since I never felt it was enough of a difference to justify the cost to go 4k).
  • romrunning - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    The only point I think you've established is that you haven't run any loads that significantly use any one component - SSD, CPU, or GPU. Well, at least you saw the GPU difference in "higher settings". If you're just doing games, I can see why you might think the big performance products don't have much of an impact. However, depending on your use case, there can be huge performance/time savings in different products.

    A high-thread count CPU can make significant time differences in rendering. So if that is something you do a lot, especially if you do this for work, then you will notice a huge difference in the time saved on rendering.

    In virtual server hosts, you can tell a difference from an all-SSD array vs all-HDD array in the responsive of the virtual guests. In databases, you can tell big differences in SSD storage vs HDD storage (not considering memory), especially with disk I/O-intensive backups & restores.

    So these are just some use cases that can highlight the significant impact of better-performing components. But all cases are different in their usage scenarios. We can't just give up on seeking better performance & go only for low-cost just because our particular use-case doesn't really display the impact of higher-performing parts.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    I think the point of the post you were responding to was to argue that there is little real world difference in most home computing scenarios between different SSDs (not SSDs vs HDDs as your response points out) despite the benchmarks showing sometimes dramatic performance advantages or disadvantages. The other accompanying parts of the post that wander into the CPU and GPU were just there to enhance the credibility of the claim by offering an argument of broad experience.
  • romrunning - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    I, too, wish for more performance MLC products; however, I think we might just transition to Optane drives & hope they go down faster in price.
  • The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    Article title: "A Next-Gen NVMe SSD Controller"

    Article conclusion: "...it doesn't appear that the combination of the E12 controller and 64L TLC is at all future-proof."
  • shabby - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    Need a catchy title for them clicks.
  • Holliday75 - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    It is Phison's next gen controller.
  • tygrus - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link

    28nm for the controller isn't new. I assume they could decrease power consumption if they used smaller fab node like 22nm. The FLASH chips themselves use/produce a lot of heat as well and 28nm might be cheaper than 22nm so compromises were made. Maybe they could bring out another version for higher performance AIC PCIe x8 or PCIe v4 signals next year (22nm fabed controller).

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now