SMI SM2262EN High-Performance SSD Controller Preview

SMI SM2262EN Power Consumption

The last area we wanted to test is power consumption and for that we have teamed up with our friends at Quarch Technology over in the UK! Legit Reviews now has a Quarch HD Programmable Power Module in-house for testing all SSDs (SAS, SATA and PCIe). This is a fully programmable power supply and measurement tool comes with power injection fixtures that stop power delivery from system, so all power comes from the power module and can be accurately recorded. Each rail can be programmed from 0 to 120% of its nominal voltage and all sorts of advanced power testing can be done.

We used IOMeter to run a 128KB 100% sequential read/write on the drive at a Queue Depth of 2 and recorded the highest power draw recorded. At idle we let the drive idle for 15 minutes and the recorded the power consumption. We captured data at 64uS / 15.63KHz over a period of 44 seconds during the start of each power test.

The SMI SM2262EN controlled 2TB reference drive that we were sent hit 5.8 Watts during the read test and 9.2 Watts during the write operation, which is actually higher than we expected. It looks like SMI still has some work to do with regards to power management before the SM2262EN hits the retail market, but they can likely iron that out soon.

During our advanced power testing testing we enabled PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) on our desktop board and in Windows 10. Enabling ASPM allows a PCIe link to be slowed down to save power when not being used. When enabling this feature the idle power of the SM2262EN 2TB reference drive power dropped from 728mW to 392mW. This is because the drive was using the L1 low-power state! Enabling ASPM might be something you should check into.

Let’s wrap this preview up!