The Intel SSD 540s (480GB) Review

Performance Consistency

Our performance consistency test explores the extent to which a drive can reliably sustain performance during a long-duration random write test. Specifications for consumer drives typically list peak performance numbers only attainable in ideal conditions. The performance in a worst-case scenario can be drastically different as over the course of a long test drives can run out of spare area, have to start performing garbage collection, and sometimes even reach power or thermal limits.

In addition to an overall decline in performance, a long test can show patterns in how performance varies on shorter timescales. Some drives will exhibit very little variance in performance from second to second, while others will show massive drops in performance during each garbage collection cycle but otherwise maintain good performance, and others show constantly wide variance. If a drive periodically slows to hard drive levels of performance, it may feel slow to use even if its overall average performance is very high.

To maximally stress the drive's controller and force it to perform garbage collection and wear leveling, this test conducts 4kB random writes with a queue depth of 32. The drive is filled before the start of the test, and the test duration is one hour. Any spare area will be exhausted early in the test and by the end of the hour even the largest drives with the most overprovisioning will have reached a steady state. We use the last 400 seconds of the test to score the drive both on steady-state average writes per second and on its performance divided by the standard deviation.

Right from the start we see a substantial improvement of the SM2258 over SM2256, as steady-state random write speed has increased by 37%. This puts the Intel 540s well ahead of any other planar TLC drive and ahead of a few low-end MLC drives as well.

While the average random write speed has improved, the consistency is a bit worse and the Intel 540s scores in the bottom tier of drives. Phison's most recent generation of TLC drives managed to deliver very consistent steady state performance, but Silicon Motion still has a lot of room for improvement here.

Default	Intel 540s 480GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX300 750GBOCZ Trion 150 480GBPNY CS1311 480GBPNY CS2211 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBSanDisk X400 1TBToshiba Q300 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBIntel SSD 750 1.2TB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe)Samsung SM951 512GB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - AHCI)Samsung XP941 512GB (PCIe 2.0 x4 - AHCI)
25% Over-Provisioning	Intel 540s 480GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX300 750GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 150 480GBPNY CS1311 480GBPNY CS2211 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk X400 1TBToshiba Q300 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB

The consistency of the 540s was clearly poor even before the transition to steady state, but during that early phase of the test it delivered twice the IOPS of the ADATA SP550.

Default	Intel 540s 480GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX300 750GBOCZ Trion 150 480GBPNY CS1311 480GBPNY CS2211 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GBSanDisk X400 1TBToshiba Q300 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBIntel SSD 750 1.2TB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe)Samsung SM951 512GB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - AHCI)Samsung XP941 512GB (PCIe 2.0 x4 - AHCI)
25% Over-Provisioning	Intel 540s 480GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX300 750GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 150 480GBPNY CS1311 480GBPNY CS2211 480GBSamsung 850 EVO 500GBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk X400 1TBToshiba Q300 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial MX100 512GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB

Once in steady state, the 540s performance mostly stays slightly above the SP550. Both drives have frequent outliers beyond their band of usual performance, and the outliers are almost all in the direction of better performance. The Intel drive's outliers hit some much higher peaks than the ADATA SP550, suggesting that the new SM2258 controller may have significantly improved performance on bursty workloads.