Integral SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB SSD Review

Integral may be a new name to some but they have been in the memory business since the late eighties with all the design, R&D and testing of products done in the UK. The company has a wide portfolio of SSD's from M.2 drives up to specialist hardware encrypted drives using military level AES 256-bit encryption. The latest drive to be launched from the Integral stable is the monster SVR-PRO 100 SRI drive range. Why a monster drive? Well currently there are only two models in the SVR-PRO 100 SRI lineup, a 4TB model and the flagship - the world's first 8TB drive. For the SVR-PRO 100 SRI, Integral has teamed up with Korean Flash specialists Novachips to equip the drive with a unique storage control architecture called HLNAND. HLNAND HyperLink NAND (HLNAND) uses a point-to-point serial daisy-chain topology to connect memory devices in a single memory "Ring". Each of these rings can support up to 255 memory devices and as each HLNAND device is directly connected the next one in the ring, it's driving a single point load. This means that there is no degradation of bandwidth regardless of the number of devices attached in the ring. This offers the potential of some truly huge capacity drives in the future. HLNAND is not a new form of memory direct from silicon like 3D NAND for example but instead it uses standard MLC NAND components. Novachips do not make their own Flash, NAND wafers and dies are sourced from other vendors. For HLNAND, Novachips has added an HL (Hyper-link) bridge inside the NAND package at the base of a die stack which is used instead of the usual connection out of the package. Conventional NAND needs requires a Chip Enable (CE) signal for each package whereas HLNAND only needs a single CE signal per ring regardless of how many devices are attached, lowering power consumption. Despite the new architecture, the quoted 4K random read/write performance of the new drives is pretty conservative. The 4TB drive has a Sequential read speed of up to 551MB/s with writes up to 517MB/s. Incidentally, the 8TB drive has the same read/write figures. The quoted 4K random performance is up to 52,000 IOPS for reads and 77,000 IOPS for Writes (the 8TB drive is slower - 49,000 IOPS reads, 72,000 IOPS writes). The quoted endurance of the drive is an impressive 1000 TBW and Integral back it with a 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 4TB NAND Components: Novachips HLNAND Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III) Form Factor: 2.5in 7mm NAND Controller: Novachips NVS3800-39 Dimensions: 100 x 79 x 7mm Drive Weight: 120g Firmware Version: NV.R1200 Our review sample SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB drive came in a plain white box with just the drive inside. The drive is built on a standard 2.5in, 7mm format (just by way of a note, the 8TB drive is 14mm high) using a good quality metal enclosure held together by four study screws. Once opened you are faced by a full-length PCB holding eight 256GB HLNAND packages (labelled HL7G2T44BHBB-1HB) and a single Samsung DDR3-1600 cache chip. The reverse of the board holds another eight 256GB HLNAND packages, the Novachips NVS3800-39 controller and another Samsung DDR3-1600 cache IC. Each HLNAND package is made up of 16 dies of 128Gbit MLC NAND giving a total of 256GB per package. Also on the same side of the PCB as the controller are three power capacitors to protect against power loss. The 2nd generation Novachips NVS3800-39 is an ARM-based 28nm process, 8-channel controller which supports SLC/MLC/eMLC/TLC as well as HLNAND. It can handle up to 1TB of ONFI or Toggle NAND or up to 16TB of HLNAND and supports AES 256-Bit encryption and TCG OPAL 2.0. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Intel Core i7 4790K with 16GB of DDR3-2133 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an ASRock Extreme 6 motherboard. Other drives Crucial BX100 1TB Crucial BX200 960GB Crucial M550 1TB Crucial MX200 1TB Crucial MX300 Limited Edition 750GB Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB Samsung 840 EVO 1TB Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SK hynix SE3010 960GB Ultima Pro X 960GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. CrystalMark 3.0.3. AS SSD. IOMeter PCMark 8 Storage Consistency Test All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3. The SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB doesn't perform too well in the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD32 test, lagging behind all but Kingston's SSDNow 310 drive. The Novachips controller has no real preference for the type of data it is asked to handle as shown by the closeness of the two benchmark result screens. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. The official Sequential performance figures for the SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB are up to 551MB/s for reads and up to 517MB/s for writes. These numbers proved to be bang on the money when the drive was tested with the ATTO benchmark. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. Although the SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB is labelled a read intensive drive, in the AS SSD benchmark it is the write performance that comes to the fore. The random 4K write performance at both shallow and deep queue depths completely overshadows the read performance. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. Tested 4K random read performance came in a 52,215 IOPS, which was a little better than the official 52,000 IOPS. However, the review drive didn't reach the maximum official 77,000 IOPS for writes, falling short at 64,479 IOPS. We also tested the drive with various IOMeter simulations that it might be used for in a work environment. The drive shows its read-intensive credentials when dealing with the read intensive applications; SQL Server 2008 OLTP, Web File Server 64KB, Media Streaming and Video On Demand. The performance drops considerably when it deals with less read-intensive operations.Futuremark's PCMark 8 is a very good all round system benchmark but it's Storage Consistency Test takes it to whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run. Preconditioning The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice. Degradation Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes. Steady State Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times. Recovery The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times. Clean Up The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. The drive didn't handle PCM8 Consistency test too well with high latency results throughout the final parts of the degradation tests and when in a steady state. It didn't recover too well from the ordeal either. The SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB shows a very consistent level of performance at high queue depths, which for a drive that has data center use as a target audience is what you want to see. Consistency again is the word when looking at the 4K write performance of the drive, but it achieves this consistency from much lower queue depths, maintaining it for longer than it does for reads. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 4TB SVR-PRO 100 SRI averaged 24,828 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 94% . To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). The drive handles reading and writing large file sizes with ease as can be seen by the performance for the Movie, Photo and Audio folder transfer speeds. It's much less happy dealing with the small bity files contained in the 50GB File Folder. Novachips HLNAND technology shows that 3D NAND isn't the only way to produce large capacity SSD's in the standard 2.5in format. This is good news for the market in general, as with more competition in the very large capacity SSD market segment should come much more competitive pricing than there is at the moment. Novachips claim that the new technology offers superior scalability, reliability and performance over conventional NAND flash drives and certainly the 'Ring' architecture it uses offers the potential for some truly colossal drives. Integral are certainly not pussy footing around with the technology either, offering 4TB and 8TB drives straight off the bat which gives an inkling of what's possible with the technology. Performance-wise the 4TB SVR-PRO 100 SRI has quoted Sequential read/write figures of up to 551MB/s and 517MB/s respectively, figures we could confirm using the ATTO benchmark - the tested drive producing figures of 552MB/s for reads and 519MB/s for writes. Tested 4K random performance was a mixed bag with reads matching the official figure of 52,000 IOPS at 52,215 IOPS while at 64,479 IOPS the write performance fell short of the official 77,000 IOPS. The drive didn't perform too well in the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD32 or AS SSD benchmarks. However, at deeper queue depths (QD32 and upwards) the drive performed well in both read and write tests and at a queue depth of 256 gave a performance stability rating of 94%, which is very good indeed. It also excelled when tested with some read intensive IOMeter tests, pretty much justifying its 'Read Intensive' label. The drive offers great endurance at 1000TBW but to show just how durable HLNAND can be, Integral offer high endurance HLNAND drives, the SVR-PRO 200 SMW range, whose flagship 6.4TB drive comes with an insane rating of 11680TBW. Strangely for a drive that could easily find itself in a data center environment, there is no mention in the spec sheet for the drive about any security features. The Novachips NVS3800-39 controller does though support AES 128/256 bit and XTS-AES encryption as well as TCG Opal 2.0. What is provided however is hardware power protection in the shape of three power capacitors soldered on the drives PCB. We found the 4TB Integral SVR-PRO 100 SRI on the Insight website for £1,615.19 (inc VAT) HERE Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros Huge capacity. Endurance. Stability at deep queue depths. Cons Pricey. Didn't perform so well in some of the benchmarks. Kitguru says: It might not be the fastest SSD we've laid hands on but it certainly is one of the biggest and offers a glimpse of what's possible without resorting to 3D NAND.

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Integral SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB SSD Review

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