Micron 5100 ECO and MAX SSD Review: High-Capacity, Affordable Datacenter Storage

Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -

Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-6700K MSI Z170A GAMING M6 (Z170 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 530 16GB EVGA DDR4-2800 Audio Boost 3 Micron 1100 SATA M.2 512 GB (OS Drive) Samsung SSD 750 EVO (500GB) Samsung SSD 850 EVO (500GB)  Intel SSD 730 (480GB) Crucial M550 (512GB) OCZ Trion 100 (960GB) OCZ Trion 150 (480GB) Micron 5100 MAX (960GB) Micron 5100 ECO (1920GB)

OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers -

Relevant Software: Windows 10 x64 Intel 10.1.1.14, DirectX 12 NVidia GeForce 378.92 Benchmarks Used: HD Tune v5.50 ATTO v2.47 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64 PCMark 7 PCMark 8 SiSoftware Sandra 2015 SP3

SiSoft SANDRA 2015 SP3 Synthetic Disk Benchmarking

First up was SiSoft SANDRA, which stands for System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run on unformatted drives and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.
Most drives are very capable of saturating SATA’s read speed limits, so write speeds are generally more important to compare in this test. In that regard, both Micron 5100 Series SSDs come out on top with the slightest edge given to the 5100 MAX. Interestingly, both drives do lag slightly in read speeds, though this is unlikely to make any perceivable difference in real-world situations.

ATTO Disk Benchmark More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

Performance tends to level off around 1MB, so we only display results to 8MB. The Micron 5100 Series drives show poorer than expected results at small transfer sizes, but quickly jump to outpace most of the competition by 4KB in the write tests and by 32KB in read tests. Also interesting is the 5100 ECO’s better read performance between 8K and 64K compared to the 5100 MAX, which could be attributable to the 5100 ECO’s higher capacity and read-focused optimizations.