The Inland Performance Plus 2TB SSD Review: Phison's E18 NVMe Controller Tested
by Billy Tallis on May 13, 2021 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
Our AnandTech Storage Bench tests are traces (recordings) of real-world IO patterns that are replayed onto the drives under test. The Destroyer is the longest and most difficult phase of our consumer SSD test suite. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
Average Data Rate | |||||||||
Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
Energy Usage |
The Inland Performance Plus delivers excellent overall performance on The Destroyer, but the WD Black SN850 beats it on almost every subscore. The best result from the E18 drive is with write latency, where it is the clear leader in average latency and a close second in 99th percentile latency. The energy efficiency of the Inland Performance Plus is poor—common for high-end drives, but Samsung and especially WD are better here.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
The ATSB Heavy test is much shorter overall than The Destroyer, but is still fairly write-intensive. We run this test twice: first on a mostly-empty drive, and again on a completely full drive to show the worst-case performance.
Average Data Rate | |||||||||
Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
Energy Usage |
On the Heavy test, the Inland Performance Plus delivers great performance, though again it falls short of the WD Black SN850. It's also only a small improvement over the Phison E16-based Silicon Power US70, and several of the best Gen3 drives end up with better performance when testing against a full drive. The Performance Plus is also one of the most power-hungry drives on this test, again requiring almost 50% more energy to finish the tests than the WD Black SN850.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
The ATSB Light test represents ordinary everyday usage that doesn't put much strain on a SSD. Low queue depths, short bursts of IO and a short overall test duration mean this should be easy for any SSD. But running it a second time on a full drive shows how even storage-light workloads can be affected by SSD performance degradation.
Average Data Rate | |||||||||
Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
Energy Usage |
The Inland Performance Plus manages a first-place finish for overall performance on the Light test, but it's only a hair faster than the Phison E16 drive or the WD Black SN850—and the WD Black has significantly better performance on the full-drive test run. The Performance Plus also doesn't quite manage first place on most of the latency subscores, and it shows a larger full-drive penalty to the write latency scores than most other high-end drives. The Inland Performance Plus is also in last place for energy usage.
PCMark 10 Storage Benchmarks
The PCMark 10 Storage benchmarks are IO trace based tests similar to our own ATSB tests. For more details, please see the overview of our 2021 Consumer SSD Benchmark Suite.
Full System Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
Quick System Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency | ||||||
Data Drive | Overall Score | Average Bandwidth | Average Latency |
The Inland Performance Plus provides decent but not chart-topping performance on the PCMark 10 Storage tests. For the Full System Drive and Quick System Drive tests it is not able to outperform some of the faster Silicon Motion-based NVMe drives that usually provide lower random read latency than Phison drives. On the Data Drive test that is more focused on sequential IO, several older Phison drives provide better performance, suggesting that the firmware for the E18 is tuned more for general real-world performance rather than exclusively trying to maximize simple benchmark scores—but we'd still like to see a controller this powerful consistently beating its predecessors on all kinds of workloads.
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Samus - Sunday, May 16, 2021 - link
Microsoft really has to get with the times and launch ReFS on the client end already. NTFS is a joke compared to even legacy file systems like EXT3 and hasn't been updated in 20 years (unless you consider the journaling update starting with Windows 8)GeoffreyA - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Well, NTFS might not have been updated much, but you know what they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It was quite advanced for its time. Still is solid. Had journalling from the start, Unicode, high-precision time, etc. Compression came next. Then in NT 5, encryption, sparse files, quotas, and all that. Today, the main things it's lacking are copy-on-write, de-duplication, and checksums for data. Microsoft seems to have downplayed ReFS, owing to some technical issues.MyRandomUsername - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Have you tried compression on NTFS (particularly on small files). I/O performance on a high end NVME drive plummets to first gen SSD level. Absolutely unusable.GeoffreyA - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link
Haven't got an NVMe drive but I'll try some experiments and see how it goes. Could be that many, small files stagger any SSD.mode_13h - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
> copy-on-write, de-duplicationA huge use case for that is snapshots. They're my favorite feature of BTRFS.
GeoffreyA - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link
Glancing over it, Btrfs looks impressive.mode_13h - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Copy-on-write can cause problems, in some cases. BTRFS lets you disable it on a per-file, per-directory, or per-subvolume basis.One feature of BTRFS I haven't touched is its built-in RAID functionality. I've always used it atop a hardware RAID controller or even a software RAID. And if you're using mechanical disks, software RAID is plenty fast, these days.
GeoffreyA - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
Whenever there's sharing of this sort, there's always trouble round the corner.mode_13h - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
> Whenever there's sharing of this sort, there's always trouble round the corner.Maybe. I think the issue is really around pretending you have a unique copy, when it's really not. In that sense, it's a little like caches -- usually a good optimization, but there's pretty much always some corner case where you hit a thrashing effect and they do more harm than good.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, May 23, 2021 - link
"I think the issue is really around pretending you have a unique copy, when it's really not."You hit the nail there. A breaking down between concept ("I've got a unique copy") and implementation. And so the outside world, tying itself to the concept, runs into occasional trouble.