SMI SM2262EN High-Performance SSD Controller Preview
Linear Write, File Transfer and Game Load Time Testing
AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
We’ve had some people ask for AIDA64 linear write tests to be done, so we fired that utility up to see what would happen.
When you take a look at extended sustained write performance you’ll see that the performance started out at around 2620 MB/s and remained there until about 22% of the drive is filled and then the performance drops off. This is because the SLC cache was full. Performance dropped down to around 1000 MB/s before hitting a low of just 170 MB/s after a bit longer. The good news here is that you’d need to write over 400GB of data to this drive before encountering a performance hit like this without any breaks for the drive to recover. Very few home users move over 400GB of data at a time, so this isn’t something to be worried about. The fact that you can move 400GB of data at an average speed of around 2600 MB/s is super impressive! That said, it will be interesting to see how the smaller capacity drives perform when the SLC cache is filled.
Real World File Transfer
Let’s see how real-world was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to measure write performance by transferring over a 30.6GB folder of movies off of a PCIe NVMe SSD to the drive being tested to see how performance looks.
The SM2262EN 2TB reference drive finished our file transfer test with an average speed of 1541.1 MB/s. This score puts it just behind the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB drive and is in second place on our chart. Super impressive results as there are a ton of big name drives on this chart that are superb SSDs.
Game Load Time Testing
To test game load times we use the Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood Official Benchmark with the game resolution bumped up from the default setting to 1920×1080, which is the most widely used screen resolution by gamers.
The results here show that spinning disks take the most time then you have SATA III SSDs being a good bit faster and then you have the PCIe NVMe drives being the fastest. Most PCIe NVMe drives with NAND Flash memory finish load the game in around 29-33 seconds and the SMI SM2262EN 2TB reference drive becomes the first NAND Flash drive to break the 29 second mark. The Intel Optane 900P with 3D Xpoint memory technology still is the fastest drive when it comes to game load times, but NAND Flash drivers are now just a couple seconds behind and cost far less.
We were most impressed by the SM2262EN controller on these three tough tests.