JMicron JMF667H Reference Design (128GB & 256GB) Review

AnandTech Storage Bench 2013

Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based - we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.

We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.

While the JMF667H appears to be one of the slowest controllers we have tested, the situation isn't all that bad. 256GB Crucial M550 and Plextor M6S are only a few megabytes faster per second and bear in mind that these use more expensive 8-channel controllers from Marvell. When you look at it that way, the JMF667H is actually relatively competitive.

Unfortunately I did not have the time to process the trace of the 256GB drive with Toshiba NAND but I do have the service time for it, and it looks a lot better. Bear in mind that this drive is over-provisioned down to 240GB and thus can't be compared directly with the 256GB drive with IMFT NAND but compared to the other 240GB drives in the market, the JMF667H with Toshiba NAND certainly seems competitive.

Update 6/12: I was able to process the trace for the 240GB Toshiba drive and the performance is twice the IMFT version. It's a bit faster than the Phison-based Corsair Force LS, which is great news in terms of competition.