Sneak Peek – Phison E12 High-Performance SSD Controller

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 Phison E12 960GB reference drive had an overall score of 14,699.93 points. The drive topped out at 2,731 MB/s read and 2,852 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 was basically the same at 14,912.25 points.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K Read performance at various queue depths we see that the Phison E12 960GB reference drive is among the fastest tested.

Benchmark Results: The 4K Random Write performance again had the Phison E12 reference drive looking good and in fact by QD32 it was the third fastest of the drives in the chart. Low QD RW performance was comparable to many of other SSDs.

When looking at low-QD performance on the Phison E8 controller on the Kingston A1000 series 960GB drive versus the Phison E12 960GB reference drive the performance differences are rather significant. Both drives are using Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS3 TLC NAND Flash memory, so the controller is the key difference here. We can see that the Phison E8 4-channel PCIe NVMe Gen 3.0 x2 controller can only do so much and the Phison E12 8-channel PCIe NVMe Gen 3.0 x4 controller offers nearly 50% more performance at QD3 and QD4!