ZHITAI TiPro7000 1TB

• Basic Information
• Latency
  • Max Write Latency
• Speed
  • Sequential Write
  • SLC cache retirement
  • Random Write
  • Trim
• Power
  • basic data
  • Low Power State
  • Active Power Consumption
  • Sequential Write
  • Sequential Read
• Reliability
  • Data Retention

Basic Information

In this report, we compare ZhiTai (YMTC’s channel brand) TiPro7000 with 980Pro and SN850 from Samsung and WD respectively. They are all designed for high-end Client market, like gaming PC.

	Model Name	Firmware Version
TiPro7000	ZHITAI TiPro7000 THREE-BODY 1TB	ZTA32F46
980Pro	Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB	5B2QGXA7
SN850	WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0	614900WD

Latency

First of all, let’s check their latency. We believe Latency is overlooked in many SSD evaluations.

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)	Trim 50% (ms)	Overwrite 50% (ms)
TiPro7000	50.809	255.160	254.445	265.706	248.747	256.812	257.933	250.619
aged1	161.036	260.417	278.812	274.341	286.072	253.195	264.161	801.613
aged2	154.106	254.654	277.669	281.274	280.474	290.754	282.330	293.091
980Pro	8.616	8.461	8.462	14.148	42.767	113.652	58.529	105.543
SN850	0.287	5.812	6.555	6.118	166.909	15.846	13.649	1158.337

Appearently, TiPro7000 has the high max latency problem in most of the test cases. It would give users sluggish experience sometime.

Speed

We test write performance after filling 10% and 50% of the whole space respectively.

Sequential Write

	10% filled (MB/s)	50% filled (MB/s)	90% filled (MB/s)
TiPro7000	5366.736	2200.192	996.669
aged2	1527.100	1524.846	1524.079
980Pro	3065.800	1730.118	1796.586
SN850	4833.883	1427.258	1649.519

When drive is young, TiPro7000 has much higher performance than 980Pro and SN850. When it is aged (in aged2, P/E>2000), its sequential write speed drops to 1.5GB/s. This performance drop is expected, because the SLC cache may retired at that time.

When the drive is highly utilized (90% filled), TiPro7000’s sequential write speed drops significantly to less than 1GB/s.

From the diagram below, we can find the same problem of Lenovo Y9000: time 0 performance is very low. The drive seems be kicked off later than others.

SLC cache retirement

TiPro7000 use the whole capacity as SLC cache. When the drive is young, and utilized space is low, it gives user the highest performance. But when space is occupied, especially when 90% space filled, we can notice a big performance drop in the above test. Furthermore, when the drive is written extensively (e.g. > 2000 P/E used), we can also find that almost the whole SLC cache is retired, and we cannot observe SLC performance at all in that the test diagram below.

Random Write

TiPro7000’s random write performance is not the best, but it is good enough.

	10% filled (K IOPS)	50% filled (K IOPS)	90% filled (K IOPS)
TiPro7000	318.165	224.064	213.358
980Pro	386.622	629.517	544.405
SN850	280.283	250.407	158.988

Trim

Except for read and write, Trim is also a common command in nowadays’ OS. We test its performance by trim half LBA space.

TiPro7000 has very good Trim performance, on both speed and Latency. And the write speed can gain the benefit from Trim, the sequential write performance is increased more than 100% after triming half LBA space.

	IOPS (K)	Average Latency (ms)	performance before trim (MB/s)	performance after trim (MB/s)
TiPro7000	11.628	1.329	1609.822	3414.978
980Pro	1.676	9.535	2172.154	2938.130
SN850	4.184	3.804	2029.665	3225.354

Power

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

basic data

We list TMT1/2 setting below. TiPro7000’s TMT1/TMT2 setting is much higher than imagination, but I don’t think they use automotive-grade NAND.

	TMT1/degreeC	TMT2/degreeC
TiPro7000	99	109
980Pro	81	82
SN850	80	82

Low Power State

	PS4 measured power (mW)	PS4 exit duration (us)	PS3 measured power (mW)	PS3 exit duration (us)
TiPro7000	9.6	44225.1	93.9	8194.0
980Pro	2043.0	408.1	2044.1	417.2
SN850	1333.3	164.7	1332.1	164.1

TiPro7000 has the reasonable low power consumption of PS4 and PS3. And its exit duration is well controlled. However, in our stress low power state transition test (saw_diagram.py), TiPro7000 failed to exit from PS3 and the drive is lost!

Active Power Consumption

Sequential Write

We compare the performance and power consumption of TiPro7000 and SN850 in sequential write test below.

Both TiPro7000 and SN850 use the full capacity as SLC cache, so their SLC performance can last longer, around 60-second. Though their max power consumption are similar, SN850’s temperature is much higher. So SN850 starts thermal throttling earlier even when SLC cache is not used up, and TiPro7000 has a much better performance consistency in the whole duration of the test.

Sequential Read

TiPro7000 has a better sequential read performance due to lower power consumption and temperature. But we can notice the time-0 performance problem again.

Reliability

Data Retention

In our whole test process, we will write each DUT to its EOL (about 3000 P/E cycle for TLC SSD), then write the whole drive and keep them without power at the room temperature for 2 month. After that, we read the whole drive and verify its data integrity. Here is the test result.

	Data Units Written (1000LBA)	read speed 0 (MB/s)	read speed 2 (MB/s)
TiPro7000	4735478410	5928	UECC
980Pro	5542172462	6177	6345
SN850	7506783940	4941	188

‘read speed 0’ is captured right after the data was written, and ‘read speed 0’ is captured 2-month later. SN850 was written by much more data intentionally. We check the result of ‘read speed 2’.

TiPro7000 reports many UECC data, so its test fails. 980Pro test passes with normal speed, even though it has more data written than TiPro7000. Due to the greater data written quantity, SN850 suffers from NAND raw data quality issue, but it still can pass the test. Even though the performance is ultra-low (188MB/s), all data can be recovered finally.

UECC simply means data lost.