SMI SM2262EN High-Performance SSD Controller Preview

By Nathan Kirsch August 30, 2018

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 Silicon Motion SM2262EN 2TB reference drive had an overall score of 16,059.47 points. The drive topped out at 2,981 MB/s read and 2,618.93 MB/s write on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes.

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 score went up just slightly to 16,233.17 points.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K Read performance at various queue depths the Intel SSD Optane 900P/905P are clearly the fastest that we’ve ever tested, but the SM2262EN controller does very well with the next fastest QD1 Random Read performance. The QD1 thru QD4 performance on the SM2262 2TB reference drive is the highest of any NAND Flash SSD that we have tested, so that is good news for Silicon Motion as this is where over 90% of workloads are at for consumer PCs.

Benchmark Results: The 4K Random Write performance on the SM2262EN was again found to be solid with the highest performance we’ve ever seen from any PCIe NVMe SSD!