JD JZao9 1TB

It is a poor designed drive. Only basic performance is optimised. Both max-latency and low-power are bad. Many tests failed in conformance tests and performance tests. Even Linux inbox driver cannot detect the drive. 👎

JD JZao9 1TB

Basic Information

In this report, we review JZao9 from JD.com with Lenovo Y9000 and ZhiTai TiPro7000.

Model Name Firmware Version
JZao9 J.ZAO 9 SERIES 1TB SSD 3.7.2.16
Y9000 Lenovo Y9000 SSD-M.2-2280s-NVMe-1T EIFM31.4
TiPro7000 ZHITAI TiPro7000 THREE-BODY 1TB ZTA32F46

In this report, we use the aged (P/E is about 1000) performance data for comparison.

Latency

We still check the latency first of all.

Max Write Latency

10 IOPS (ms) 4K 1QD (ms) 512B 1QD 10p filled (ms) 512B 1QD 50% filled (ms) 4K mix RW 90% filled (ms) RW mixed with trim (ms) Overwrite 50% (ms)
JZao9 9.353 10.444 192.764 2815.426 399.199 389.069 359.472
Y9000 7.853 9.788 258.103 5.970 15.949 280.053 1303.401
TiPro7000 161.036 260.417 278.812 274.341 286.072 253.195 801.613

High max latency is the common issue of all these 3 drives. JZao9 even has max latency as high as 3 seconds. It needs a lot of effort to optimize max latency, but most of the simple test tools do not care this value. However, the unpredicted long latency can give user a noticable delay.

Speed

SLC cache

We keep write the drives from the empty state. JZao9 also use the whole capacity as SLC cache, so when the SLC is used up, the write speed will drop significantly.

picture

SLC cache retirement

When the drive is young and utilized space is low, SLC cache gives user the highest performance. But when the drive is aged (e.g. > 2000 P/E cycle), we can find that almost the whole SLC cache is retired, and we cannot observe SLC performance any more in the test diagram below.

picture

Y9000 use a small SLC cache, but it can last longer. In the test below, we can still have the SLC performance when the drive is as old as the JZao9 above.

picture

Full capacity SLC cache can give a beautiful score in FOB state. But when the drive is old and fully used, huge SLC cache would cause huge drop on performance.

5-stage write performance

We test random write performance after filling 10%, 50%, 90% respectively. Furthermore, we will fill the first 50% space for the second time, and repeat test again. And we will also trim the first 50% space, and repeat the same test. Here is the result.

picture

We can find that more space filled, SLC performance can keep for shorter duration. But Trim can recover the performance.

Power

If we use SSD in laptop, the power consumption is also a key consideration.

basic data

We list TMT1/2 setting below.

TMT1 (℃) TMT2 (℃)
JZao9 74 84
TiPro7000 99 109
Y9000 aged2 67 69

Low Power State

PS4 measured power (mW) PS4 exit duration (us) PS3 measured power (mW) PS3 exit duration (us)
JZao9 1764.2 58.3 1767.5 56.3
Y9000 2.5 155121.4 46.5 155443.0
TiPro7000 9.0 46681.9 89.7 8192.1

It seems that JZao9 cannot enter low power state.

Function

JZao9 use the full capacity SLC cache, and is not optimized on Latency and Power, so JZao9 is far from well designed. We also observe functional issues during our tests:

  1. linux inbox driver cannot detect the drive
  2. performance test: hang and drive lost
  3. conformance tests: many failed with error happened. TCG is not supported.
  4. LED does not work.