Sneak Peek – Phison E12 High-Performance SSD Controller

Phison E12 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 Phison E12 controlled 960GB drive hit 4.9 Watts during the read test and 5.8 Watts during the write operation, which is pretty respectable compared to the other drives we have power tested as those are all 480GB-512GB models.

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 Phison E12 960GB reference drive power dropped from 605mW to 203mW. This is because the drive was using the L1 low-power state! Enabling ASPM might be something you should check into.

Here is a screen capture of what happens to power on our test system when you go from ‘Off’ to ‘Maximum Power Savings’ under Windows 10 power options when testing with on our programmable power module by Quarch Technology.

Let’s wrap this preview up!