Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals
First the outside:
…and now for the warranty breaking:
Note that despite the large heat sink area, only the E7 controller is mated to it via a thermal pad. Corsair's design team gets some serious points from me here because they appear to actually understand how flash memory endurance works. For those unaware, flash memory is designed to operate at higher temperatures, as the cells will wear less. The controller is the part that would thermally throttle at high temps, and is therefore the only part that needs to be directly cooled by the heat sink. Nice job Corsair!
The Phison E7 is surrounded by four flash packages (on this side), as well as half of the 1GB of DDR3. The 800GB model keeps the same number of packages while doubling the DDR to 2GB.
The power section of the PCB also has room for a bank of power loss capacitors, not needed on this consumer model since the E7 can mitigate most of the potential issues with how its firmware is coded.
At the rear, we have the other half of the DDR3 along with the remaining four flash packages.
Testing Methodology
Our tests are a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. We have developed a custom test suite as off-the-shelf tests just no longer cut it for in-depth storage testing. More details on the next page. If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we'll help you out!
Test System Setup
We have several storage testbeds. A newer ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt and a Gigabyte Z170X SOC Force (for RAID testing). Future PCIe and SATA device testing, including this review, take place on an ASUS Sabertooth X99, which comes equipped with USB 3.1, M.2, and can also handle SFF-8639 (U.2) devices with the proper adapter.
PC Perspective would like to thank Intel, ASUS, Gigabyte, Corsair, Kingston, and EVGA for supplying some of the components of our test rigs.
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 5820K @ 4.125 GHz |
| Motherboard | ASUS Sabertooth X99 |
| Memory | 16GB Micron DDR4 @ 3333 |
| Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
| Sound Card | N/A |
| Video Card | EVGA GeForce GTX 750 |
| Video Drivers | GeForce Game Ready Driver 347.88 |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
| DirectX Version | N/A |
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 Pro X64 (update) |
PCPer File Copy TestHDTachHDTuneIOMeterYAPT- NEW TEST SUITE!!!
This kills my Intel 750 400
This kills my Intel 750 400 GB in sequential, which matters not at all for my typical workloads. About the same or worse in random IOPS. Probably feels exactly the same in daily use. $320 price is not bad – Intel launched theirs at $400 and it’s still the same price today (luckily I got mine for $300 during a rare sale at Newegg).
I’d love to see a direct comparison review, but I’m sure these will sell better – cheaper and better looking. I’ll keep my Intel drive, because their reliability is legendary, and it just feels like it will last forever.
You can get 3 sm951 for a
You can get 3 sm951 for a little more…
as nice as those are, if I
as nice as those are, if I had that money to spend on storage then i’d rather just get more cheap sata ssd(s), like a 1TB samsung 850evo for about ~ $340.
Funny, at the conclusion page
Funny, at the conclusion page I remembered you were reviewing the Corsair NX500, I was much more interested in the details of the new testing method. Excellent work Allyn!
Request: Can we get more
Request: Can we get more reviews of gaming headsets?
gaming headsets are almost
gaming headsets are almost never good though. Just buy a hyperx cloud or sennheiser game zero/one
I had an old OCZ Z-Drive R4
I had an old OCZ Z-Drive R4 SSD with a bunch of unpopulated capacitor pads on the PCB too. Do you think they designed in some kind of power smoothing / filter stage or something and then figured the cost of adding tantalum caps to the BOM outweighed any noticeable benefit to the user?
Of course, that would be for
Of course, that would be for power loss protection on the enterprise version of the card, now that I read what Al wrote instead of just looking at the pretty pictures. That brings up another topic I find crazy, the UPS. Convert AC to DC to store it in a battery, then back to AC to feed it into the computer’s PSU, where it is converted again to DC to run all the circuits. Can’t make it any more better. Computers are solved, guys.
Yeah, it makes more sense to
Yeah, it makes more sense to just have a single version of the PCB, and add components as applicable for the enterprise version, etc.
Wow Allyn, that performance
Wow Allyn, that performance comparison history is legendary! Pulled out every SSD you could dig up in the office? You need to make that model list searchable so people can find this. A recent SSD review comparing sooooo many models is a rare find!
I kinda treat SSDs like
I kinda treat SSDs like Pokemon :). We definitely want to do better things with the data, but with this site design, we're limited to pics of charts.