Silicon Power 1TB SP001TBP34A80M28

IIvIIozzie

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Whats going on with this drive? There are almost no reviews online and it's been out for month's. If what it claims to do is true how is nobody giving it a shot? That's like a 970 Pro at almost 1/3rd cost. I'd really like to know Random R/W speeds.
 
I can't speak for the nvme/m.2 version but I've purchased 512gb and a 1tb sata silicon powered ssd's and they work pretty well. I'm guessing they skimp out on write endurance by quite a bit. I use the 1tb as a landing zone (write cache) for my drive bender array and it does the job. The write speeds aren't fantastic but the sure beat the pants off smr hdd's for random 4k writes.

Not sure if they are using tlc or qlc in that ssd but i'd guess qlc. intel 660p's and crucial's p1 are both qlc and are both quite cheap for the storage you get but the write endurance is fairly low.
 
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I can't speak for the nvme/m.2 version but I've purchased 512gb and a 1tb sata silicon powered ssd's and they work pretty well. I'm guessing they skimp out on write endurance by quite a bit. I use the 1tb as a landing zone (write cache) for my drive bender array and it does the job. The write speeds aren't fantastic but the sure beat the pants off smr hdd's for random 4k writes.

Not sure if they are using tlc or qlc in that ssd but i'd guess qlc. intel 660p's and crucial's p1 are both qlc and are both quite cheap for the storage you get but the write endurance is fairly low.

No way is it QLC, not with those fast as hell read and write speeds.

I, too, would like more info but I cannot find it anywhere including their own site. It is too bad because this looks to be a hell of a promising drive.
 
It seems on paper to be a good unit. That said, I would probably go with the HP EX920 at this point (If price were my overriding concern.) You can get them on Amazon and the bay for just about the same price. While it's listed write speed isn't as fast as the SP (Though in real-world comparisons it is probably no different), I would expect support from HP to be more available for warranty issues. On The TweakTown Review, it had the fastest non-optane game load times of any NVME drive
 
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This drive uses the brand new and very powerful Phison PS5012-E12 controller. Like 8 data channels, 600K iops, 28nm process, tons of other features. It's basically exactly as fast or a hair faster than the Samsung 970 Pro @ 1/2 the cost.

Read is 3400MBs and Write is 3200MBs .... write is a bit faster than the Samsung 970 Pro and read is exactly the same.

It's a very very fast drive, basically the best SSD drive on the market if you can find one.

It's a hidden gem for sure and not a lot of people are even aware of these controllers and the very scarce drives that are out. There are supposed to be around 15 to 20 new SSD's coming out with this controller. They are very hard to find right now. I do have a 1TB that I bought and will review soon, today maybe. Maybe not.

I paid $144, which is a steal.

I have the Inland Professional / Premium 1tb version which is just a repackaged OEM drive from the supplier / factory that is pushing this out. They are then rebranded at Corsair, MyDigital, Inland, Etc etc. These drivers are so new to market that I've noticed that the packaging actually has a lot of errors in terms of the actual specs. Also, the branding hasn't been nailed down apparently. The Inland version is actually supposed to be called the Inland Premium and not the professional. So the packing is also mis-labeled.

If you want to get the numbers, go and watch the Corsair 510 reviews as that drive uses the Phison PS5012-E12 controller.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13338/phison-ps5012e12-controller-in-mass-production

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/...-nvme-ssd-review-corsairs-fastest/index2.html

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...ink2&cjevent=83fd45763d6c11e9801201220a24060c

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12925/patriot-readies-viper-ssds-with-phison-e12-and-s12

https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/mydigitalssd-pcie-m.2-ssd/?rf_selection=620~3524:N,3516:Y,3517:Y,3520:Y,3518:Y,3521:Y,3519:N,3525:Y~N3524:49.88,563.62;M3516:e445

https://www.microcenter.com/product...0-pcie-nvme-30-x4-internal-solid-state-drive#

So you heard it here first, don't spend the $120 on these cheap Intel 660p 1tb NVMe drivers, spend the extra $15 or $20 and get the Inland Professional / Premium 1tb NVMe for $144. Problem is, it's sold out everywhere.

Hell of a drive for the money. Again, 970 Pro performance for 35% the cost.
 
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This drive uses the brand new and very powerful Phison PS5012-E12 controller. Like 8 data channels, 600K iops, 28nm process, tons of other features. It's basically exactly as fast or a hair faster than the Samsung 970 Pro @ 1/2 the cost.

Read is 3400MBs and Write is 3200MBs .... write is a bit faster than the Samsung 970 Pro and read is exactly the same.

It's a very very fast drive, basically the best SSD drive on the market if you can find one.

It's a hidden gem for sure and not a lot of people are even aware of these controllers and the very scarce drives that are out. There are supposed to be around 15 to 20 new SSD's coming out with this controller. They are very hard to find right now. I do have a 1TB that I bought and will review soon, today maybe. Maybe not.

I paid $144, which is a steal.

I have the Inland Professional / Premium 1tb version which is just a repackaged OEM drive from the supplier / factory that is pushing this out. They are then rebranded at Corsair, MyDigital, Inland, Etc etc. These drivers are so new to market that I've noticed that the packaging actually has a lot of errors in terms of the actual specs. Also, the branding hasn't been nailed down apparently. The Inland version is actually supposed to be called the Inland Premium and not the professional. So the packing is also mis-labeled.

If you want to get the numbers, go and watch the Corsair 510 reviews as that drive uses the Phison PS5012-E12 controller.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13338/phison-ps5012e12-controller-in-mass-production

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/...-nvme-ssd-review-corsairs-fastest/index2.html

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...ink2&cjevent=83fd45763d6c11e9801201220a24060c

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12925/patriot-readies-viper-ssds-with-phison-e12-and-s12

https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/mydigitalssd-pcie-m.2-ssd/?rf_selection=620~3524:N,3516:Y,3517:Y,3520:Y,3518:Y,3521:Y,3519:N,3525:Y~N3524:49.88,563.62;M3516:e445

https://www.microcenter.com/product...0-pcie-nvme-30-x4-internal-solid-state-drive#

So you heard it here first, don't spend the $120 on these cheap Intel 660p 1tb NVMe drivers, spend the extra $15 or $20 and get the Inland Professional / Premium 1tb NVMe for $144. Problem is, it's sold out everywhere.

Hell of a drive for the money. Again, 970 Pro performance for 35% the cost.
Thanks for the 411! I have had good experiences with their USB flash and SATA drives so this is a headturner
 
I just ordered 2 of these and will be plugging them into a supermicro AOC-SHG3-4M2P for some RAID testing on AM4.
Might have some benchmarks this weekend. Might get 2 more once I verify the PLEX is stable. (got hot on first initial testing)
 
I just ordered 2 of these and will be plugging them into a supermicro AOC-SHG3-4M2P for some RAID testing on AM4.
Might have some benchmarks this weekend. Might get 2 more once I verify the PLEX is stable. (got hot on first initial testing)

benchmarks before writing data and after writing a lot of data would be nice, just to see how well it manages its cache.
 
Glad someone asked this question. I'm also interested in the SP NVME SSD. So far just about everything I've seen looks good. I was also wanting to get some opinions about the size of the SSD drives. Do the 2TB NVME drives defeat the purpose? (Not necessarily referring to SP here. Just any brand) I heard that there was a significant drop in speed when they're holding a lot of data. This doesn't make sense to me since they don't rely on a spinning disk. Looks like there wouldn't be a noticeable difference.
 
Glad someone asked this question. I'm also interested in the SP NVME SSD. So far just about everything I've seen looks good. I was also wanting to get some opinions about the size of the SSD drives. Do the 2TB NVME drives defeat the purpose? (Not necessarily referring to SP here. Just any brand) I heard that there was a significant drop in speed when they're holding a lot of data. This doesn't make sense to me since they don't rely on a spinning disk. Looks like there wouldn't be a noticeable difference.

I'm probably the guy to ask.

Yes, all SSDs will lose performance when they get fuller. Most consumer SSDs are TLC-based and rely on a SLC cache. If this SLC cache is dynamic (usually) it will shrink as the drive fills; outside of this cache, the drive is much slower as it's hitting the native TLC. Additionally, the controller has to juggle the SLC cache in an attempt to keep data wear-leveled and fresh (static data refresh; readable). If you have less free space available this is more difficult as there are competing processes and it takes the drive longer to recover from workloads. SSDs have reserved (overprovisioned) space for spare blocks and an area for wear-leveling (among other things, like static SLC) which can vary from drive to drive and alter this performance. Although it's important to note even MLC drives slow down when fuller due to the nature of flash leveling (and the fact internally it's like a mini-RAID). This is a simplification though.

2TB drives are (currently) an issue because of die density. For example, the SP P34A80 uses the Phison E12 controller which is eight-channel with four chip enable (CE) per channel for a total of 32 "targets." Typical 64-layer 3D TLC is 256Gb (32GiB/die). This means it tops out at 1TiB of NAND, but it's possible to run two dies per CE with some overhead and performance loss (2TiB). However this will change with 96-layer NAND (up to 512Gb) and is not true of all drives - the WD Black and Samsung 970 EVO/EVO Plus NVME SSDs use 512Gb on their 2TB SKUs to stay single-sided. Additionally, QLC is much more dense (1024Gb/1Tb currently) so can go up to 8TB, but suffers a lot more when fuller as on the Intel 660p NVMe drive.

More resources here. I probably didn't fully answer your question (or maybe opened up new ones) so feel free to ask.
 
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I've been very past the past few days but I got my PLEX card modded up with a nice fan and have started making benchmarks, including RAID0.


Here is just a bench on single drive.
(1 drive bench)

Also I saw that right now the drives are even cheaper on Amazon than before. I just bought 2 more for $115 each and beat up my wallet to purchase the 2TB model for $265. So I will have quad NVME RAID0 (on AM4) benchmarks next week.
Here is the SMART data from the warmer drive. With even just that one fan it stays pretty cool, but that might change when I put it in my actual rig.
Code:
sudo smartctl /dev/nvme1 -a
smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-linux-5.1.5-13-tkg-pds] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       SPCC M.2 PCIe SSD
Serial Number:                      27FF07940CDE00028542
Firmware Version:                   ECFM12.2
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x1987
IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x6479a7
Total NVM Capacity:                 1,024,209,543,168 [1.02 TB]
Unallocated NVM Capacity:           0
Controller ID:                      1
Number of Namespaces:               1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity:          1,024,209,543,168 [1.02 TB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size:     512
Namespace 1 IEEE EUI-64:            6479a7 1c93683432
Local Time is:                      Mon Jun 10 19:57:17 2019 CDT
Firmware Updates (0x12):            1 Slot, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0007):   Security Format Frmw_DL
Optional NVM Commands (0x0054):     DS_Mngmt Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Maximum Data Transfer Size:         512 Pages
Warning  Comp. Temp. Threshold:     70 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold:     90 Celsius

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
 0 +    10.73W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0
 1 +     7.69W       -        -    1  1  1  1        0       0
 2 +     6.18W       -        -    2  2  2  2        0       0
 3 -   0.0490W       -        -    3  3  3  3     2000    2000
 4 -   0.0018W       -        -    4  4  4  4    25000   25000

Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt  Data  Metadt  Rel_Perf
 0 +     512       0         2
 1 -    4096       0         1

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        37 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          5%
Percentage Used:                    0%
Data Units Read:                    122,991 [62.9 GB]
Data Units Written:                 123,961 [63.4 GB]
Host Read Commands:                 705,339
Host Write Commands:                708,260
Controller Busy Time:               4
Power Cycles:                       2
Power On Hours:                     0
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   1
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0

Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, max 63 entries)
No Errors Logged

I saw that using mdadm the chunk size has a major impact on write performance. Here was one of the better ones.
The smaller chunk sizes really killed the write speeds. (8192k chunk)


Also now that this works stable with the fan I can hook a GPU up through the card and boot up from it. I left the mini-ITX on overnight with GPU and 3 NVME total plugged in at once no issues. Need above 4G decoding turned on though.
I will maybe go talk to Michael at Phoronix about how to bench these better once the rest of them come in.
 
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