AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Data Rate)

The scores on the Light test are not spread as widely as for the more intense ATSB tests, and the SLC caching capabilities of several of the drives come in handy. The X400's average data rate puts it in the middle of the pack, but its good full-drive performance distinguishes it from the other planar TLC drives and makes it tied against several MLC drives.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Latency)

The average service time of the X400 is slightly worse than average for this bunch of drives, and it isn't able to score a clear win against any MLC drives on this metric.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Latency)

The latency outliers above 10ms highlight the planar TLC drives as slower than most MLC drives, but the X400 doesn't do a particularly bad job of keeping latency low.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Power)

Once again the X400 comes in third for overall power efficiency (almost tied for second place), and this time there is a fairly clear gap between it and fourth place.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy Random Performance
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  • Chaitanya - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link

    1TB capacity in M.2 Form factor is tempting.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link

    I like the $/GB, but there aren't enough GBs.
  • Namisecond - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link

    Maybe you need to stop treating SSDs as bulk storage?
  • dsumanik - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link

    Maybe you should go back to floppies.

    It's 2016 and there is no reason for magnetic drives to be alive. Yes yes, I know about cost per gig and all the stats you feel like googling and quoting to me to prove how smart you are, but the real truth is this: it's way more profitable to sell us 50 year old technology cuz dums dums will keep on buying.

    Bring on xpoint, it'll help push traditional flash down into the bargain bin... And for u sir, Ii will gladly mail you my original dos 6.22 install disks if you simply shut the f**k up.
  • santeana - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link

    LMAO! I wish there was a like button!

    +1
  • blakeatwork - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link

    It's a process of how quickly do you need to access certain types of data. OS, programs and games all benefit from being on an SSD (assuming supporting architecture does not have any obvious bottlenecks). I'm not sure browsing photos from a recent vacation really provides the necessary strain on your I/O that requires an SSD :D
    Magnetic drives will stick around for quite a while, especially for Home/SMB NAS devices where the amount of storage is greater then the perceived need for super fast access, which is throttled by GbE network (or WiFi) anyways
  • bug77 - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link

    Modern operating system do lots of stuff in the background, an AV may scan your drives from time to time. This is stuff that kills IO on a HDD and that barely registers on a SSD. So there are reason for moving away from HDDs... But yes, the HDD will stick around for a while, simply because of pricing.
  • jordanclock - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link

    Good thing we just dump all old technology as soon as we find a replacement!
  • edward1987 - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link

    1TB is quite out of my pocket £218 (http://www.span.com/product/SanDisk-X400-SSD-SD8SN... but 512GB I would not mind. If you have Qnap tvs-1282 server or similar - they have m.2 for caching or tiered storage. I can use for it in there.
  • HollyDOL - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link

    There is a mismatch in Specification table:
    1TiB (1024GB) should be 1TB(1000GB)
    According to specs at https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam/sandisk-main/e...

    putting 10^3n and 2^10n prefixes together is just incorrect anyway without correct recalculation...

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