Performance

So a fancy PCIe adapter is nice and all but what I really want to know is how well the Predator performs. To do that I ran it through our SSD benchmark suite. I tested the card using the PCIe adapter on our test bench but because our motherboard also supported M.2 x4 I did pull the M.2 off and test it directly on the board. The results were exactly the same, confirming that the adapter didn’t introduce any weird slowdowns or issues.

So in our first test using CrystalDiskMark how did the Predator perform? Well I had no expectations of this drive performing up with the NVMe Intel drive but I was surprised at just how close it managed to get on this benchmark, especially on the read speeds. With a read speed of 1449 and a write speed of 1011 it is fair to say that the Predator is a monster. This is worlds above the SATA based devices and that isn’t really a big surprise given the limitations of SATA.

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In AS SSD the Predator didn’t get as close in performance to the Intel as in CrystalDiskMark but it did still blow the other drives out of the water.

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With the four Passmark benchmarks we did start to see some limitations of the Predator, to the point where some of the OCZ drives performed better, even over SATA. The workstation test did have numbers that out performed even the Intel drive though. It was just in the Database and File Server tests that the Intel and OCZ drives really pulled ahead.

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The PCMark 8 benchmark consists of multiple real world benchmarks including loading things like WoW and office. In the end we use the average bandwidth over the score that is provided because the score doesn’t really show the difference between drives as well as the bandwidth result. Here we can see that the Predator performed well ahead of all of the SATA based drives but was still bested by the Intel 750 Series by a large amount, no surprises there.

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In Anvil’s Storage Utilities I run through their SSD test but only use the read and write IOPS results from the 4K QD16 tests. Here we can start to see where the Predator falls on its face. Don’t get me wrong the numbers are good, but they are barely faster than the SATA drives and frankly the Intel 750 almost pulled more read IOPS than the Predator did on read and writes together.

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With my previous Anvil results I was really curious to see how the Predator would perform in our 4K QD testing. The Predator with its Marvell 88SS9293 Altaplus controller performs just slightly ahead of the SATA drives up until a queue depth of 16. Moving up to 32 we saw a nice jump but then the drive falls completely flat, not improving at all beyond that. On the write benchmarks the results were similar but in some queue depths the SATA drives actually pulled slightly ahead.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #36648 06 May 2015 02:03
Today I take a look at a PCIe based M.2 drive with a PCIe adapter from Kingston

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