How We Test PCIe 4.0 Storage: The AnandTech 2021 SSD Benchmark Suite
by Billy Tallis on February 1, 2021 1:15 PM ESTIO Traces: AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB)
Our in-house suite of storage traces has been a staple of our SSD reviews for almost a decade. The current versions of the AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) Light and Heavy tests were introduced in 2011, but soon proved to be insufficient for stressing newer SSDs that were faster and larger. The Destroyer was added in 2013 to provide a much longer and more intense test, and in 2015 we started running the Light and Heavy tests twice: once on an empty drive, and again on a full drive to show the worst-case performance drop.
While these IO traces were recorded a number of years ago, upon regression analysis to a modern environment, the mix of random vs sequential transfers are almost identical. IO patterns involved in ordinary consumer PC usage haven't changed drastically in the past decade. Downloading and installing a recent AAA video game involves a lot more total IO, but things like the mix of random vs sequential transfers are still pretty similar.
The way we have enabled recorded the tests also removes any historic limitations of queue depth limits - IO tracing at the OS level enables the capture of dozens or hundreds of IOs at once, such that playback on modern NVMe systems feel the brute force of the IO required. In practice, queue depths during ordinary desktop usage are usually in the single digits, and on fast NVMe drives like Intel's Optane SSD the queue depths experienced by the drive will tend to be even a bit lower. In the case of TRIM or flush commands, these are relatively uncommon during ordinary consumer workloads, and are often highly variable and inconsistent in their timing, and so those are not present in the test. This was more an issue with older SSDs anyway. Similarly with enterprise drives, most of which enable their own data management.
The IO traces used for the ATSB tests originally recorded the precise timing of every IO operation. During the playback process, the idle times in the trace are cut short to a maximum of 25ms each. This is necessary for the test duration to be reasonable, but it does mean that drives don't get long stretches of idle time to use for garbage collection and flushing SLC caches. But in aggregate, the drives are still spending a lot more time idle than busy: during a relatively quick 7 hour run of The Destroyer, a fast NVMe SSD will only spend a bit more than 2 hours busy with one or more pending IO operation. The rest of the time is accounted for by a very large number of short idle periods.
AnandTech Storage Bench IO Traces | ||||||||||||||
The Destroyer | Heavy | Light | ||||||||||||
Reads | 38.83 million | 2.17 million | 373k | |||||||||||
Writes | 10.98 million | 1.78 million | 460k | |||||||||||
Total IO Operations | 49.8 million | 3.99 million | 832k | |||||||||||
Total GB Read | 1583.02 GiB | 48.63 GiB | 17.97 GiB | |||||||||||
Total GB Written | 875.62 GiB | 106.32 GiB | 23.25 GiB | |||||||||||
Typical Test Duration | 7 hours (NVMe) 12 hours (SATA) |
1h 15m | 25m |
Aside from the updated hardware and Windows versions, the one big change we're making to how the ATSB tests are run is a change for the sake of better automation. Previously, the drives being tested were secure erased before each ATSB trace playback, and for the Light and Heavy test runs on a full drive we would erase the drive, fill it, then play back the trace. But secure erasing drives is a hassle when Windows is involved, so this meant manually rebooting to Linux five times for the five trace runs. Our new method is to run all the trace tests in sequence: starting from a freshly-erased empty drive, we run the Light test, then the Heavy and The Destroyer, then fill the drive with sequential writes and run the Light and Heavy tests again. This means that our "empty drive" test runs of the Heavy test and The Destroyer are now running on a lightly-(ab)used drive rather than a freshly-erased drive, and that may bring down the scores somewhat. The full drive run of the Heavy test will also be somewhat affected by the mix of IO performed by the preceding Light test that disturbs the preconditioning of the full-drive sequential write pass. This eases our testing process and saves my sanity somewhat.
As always, we're still giving the drives plenty of idle time (10 minutes) between test runs and after the sequential write pass. The speed of today's NVMe drives mean that the automated sequence of running all five stages of the ATSB tests now takes about the same ~12 hours that was average for a SATA drive to complete just The Destroyer. Batching the ATSB tests together makes for more effective time usage when running these tests overnight, and less sleep lost to manual intervention.
The performance scores presented for each ATSB test include the overall average throughput during the test, and several subscores breaking down average and 99th percentile latency for both read and write operations. We also report the total energy usage during the test, which is a good indication of overall efficiency. Low-power drives that take a long time to complete the test and drives that complete it quickly but with high power draw will both suffer in the energy usage rankings.
Average Data Rate | |||||||||
Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
Energy Usage |
Average Data Rate | |||||||||
Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
Energy Usage |
Average Data Rate | |||||||||
Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
Energy Usage |
PCMark 10 Storage Benchmarks
At the end of 2019, UL released a major update to their popular PCMark 10 benchmark suite, adding storage performance tests that had been conspicuously absent for over two years. These new storage benchmarks are similar to our AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests in that they are composed of traces of real-world IO patterns that are replayed onto the drive under test.
PCMark 10 provides four different storage benchmarks. The Full System Drive, Quick System Drive and Data Drive benchmarks cover similar territory to our ATSB Heavy and Light tests, and all three together take about as long to run as the ATSB Heavy and Light tests combined. The Drive Performance Consistency Test is clearly meant to one-up The Destroyer and also measure the worst-case performance of a drive that is completely full. Due to time constraints, we are not yet attempting to add the Drive Performance Consistency Test to our usual test suite. This is a line we're put in to ensure timely arrival of reviews.
PCMark 10 Storage Tests | ||
Test Name | Data Written | |
Data Drive | 15 GB | |
Quick System Drive | 23 GB | |
Full System Drive | 204 GB | |
Drive Performance Consistency | 23 TB + 3x drive capacity |
The primary subscores for the PCMark 10 Storage benchmarks are average bandwidth and average latency for read and write IOs. These are combined into an overall score by computing the geometric mean of the bandwidth score and the reciprocal of the latency score.
Full System Drive Benchmark
The Full System Drive Benchmark covers a broad range of everyday tasks: booting Windows and starting applications and games, using Office and Adobe applications, and file management. The "Full" in the name does not mean that each drive is filled or that the entire capacity of the drive is tested. Rather, it only indicates that all of the PCMark 10 Storage sub-tests are included in this test.
Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency |
Quick System Drive Benchmark
The Quick System Drive Benchmark is a subset of the Full System Drive Benchmark, running only 6 out of the 23 sub-tests from the Full test.
Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency |
Data Drive Benchmark
The Data Drive Benchmark is intended to represent usage a secondary or portable drive may be subject to. This test simulates copying around files, but does not simulate the IO associated with launching and running applications from a drive.
Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency |
70 Comments
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edzieba - Friday, February 5, 2021 - link
I'd love to see the PCIe 4.0 drives tested at PCIe 3.0 speeds, to see how much of the performance advantage is really down to link rate vs. just newer controllers and NAND.Agent Smith - Friday, February 5, 2021 - link
Where is the Sabrent Rocket 4 PLUS ?Oxford Guy - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link
Inland Performance Plus drive does not fit in a Gigabyte Z390 UD, even though it’s an ATX board.Gigabyte managed to screw that up. The screw is too close to the expansion slot. It also conflicts with my EK CPU watercooling bracket.
Stealth ways to punish people for saving a bit of money?
Shows the importance of having actual reviews rather than specs run-through.
Oxford Guy - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link
It also shows what happens when there is a Wild West lack of standardization.It’s utterly ridiculous to buy a part and have it be impossible to install.
Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link
Inland Performance Plus is this the M.2 NVMe with a built-in heatsink? M.2 is a well-established standard with exact dimensions for everything including the screw hole. However, the standard does not include any heatsink and thus any M.2 you find with a heatsink on is a gamble in terms of compatibility.Reviews don't really help with that because it's impossible to test comptiability in +100 motherboards in all sorts of configurations.
RobJoy - Thursday, February 11, 2021 - link
What about newest PCIe 4.0 drives?XacTactX - Thursday, February 11, 2021 - link
Mr. Tallis, I'd appreciate some advice from you about the spare area of an SSD and how it impacts performance. I have a question about the numbers in this picture:https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16458/hea...
I understand that an SSD has high performance when it is empty, and the performance drops off when it is full. I have two questions:
1. How much spare area do you leave on the SSDs for the full "Heavy" benchmark?
2. As a rule of thumb, how much spare area do you think needs to be left on an SSD so the performance will stay closer to the empty numbers and it will not degrade significantly, like in the full numbers
Thank you for your time.
Scour - Monday, February 15, 2021 - link
The most important thing for me is writing big amount of data which exceeds the Pseudo-SLC-Cache. And the speed if the SSD is almost full.Reviews of the speed of the Pseudo-SLC-Cache can be found often.
And I hope an Intel system with PCIe 4.0 will also be available soon in your tests :)
TechW - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Perhaps I missed it if it is being done. I'd like to see benchmarks on drives that support hardware encryption with the encryption enabled. Several new ones coming out at the end of this month now will support hardware encryption. That would be a good time to do testing with encryption enabled.saurabsfdc - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
how is 2 years old Kingston a2000 compared to Samsung 980.i guess except sequential read write which is higher in Samsung 980 , random read write might be lower than Kingston . Also Kingston consumes less power than Samsung 980 as per data sheet.