MyDigitalSSD BPX M.2 NVMe 480GB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch January 17, 2017

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the MyDigitalSSD BPX M.2 480GB SSD scored 9,677 points with stock Windows NVMe Driver and Windows write-cache buffer flushing disabled on the drive.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall dropped just a bit down to 9.662.92 points.

Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K Random Read performance and found we we topped out at 202,000 IOPS, which is a fair bit above the drives rated 4K Random Read rating of 150,000 IOPS, but it is slightly lower than similar drives like the Patriot Hellfire and Corsair MP500.

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the MyDigitalSSD BPX 480GB drive topped out at 173,000 IOPS at QD64 and that is well below the drives rated 265,000 4K Random Write performance rating with IOMeter.