The Inland Performance Plus 2TB SSD Review: Phison's E18 NVMe Controller Tested
by Billy Tallis on May 13, 2021 8:00 AM ESTConclusion
With drives like the Inland Performance Plus, Phison's E18 controller has kept them in competition for the consumer SSD performance crown. The Inland Performance Plus is an extremely fast drive that sets a few new performance records, but more often it ends up tied or slightly slower than a competing PCIe 4.0 flagship SSD. The difference between this drive and other top PCIe 4.0 drives like the WD Black SN850 would not be noticeable during real-world usage, so the question of which one is fastest is more about bragging rights than tangible benefits.
Phison is the only company already on their second generation of PCIe 4.0 controllers, but they still have some room for improvement. The Inland Performance Plus consistently had high power consumption and poor efficiency during our testing. It's not completely out of line for a high-end drive that needs to prioritize performance over power efficiency, but the bar is being raised by the in-house controllers from several of the major NAND manufacturers. A second round of Phison E18-based products will be coming to market soon using Micron's 176L TLC rather than the current 96L TLC, and that should enable slightly improved performance and power efficiency. It might be enough to bump the new E18 drives into first place on more performance tests, and will definitely help keep this market segment highly competitive.
Our most difficult (and least realistic) tests revealed that the Inland Performance Plus and the Phison E18 controller and firmware also have some difficulties with performance consistency, for random read latency and for write performance where the SLC caching behavior occasionally leaves something to be desired. These aren't serious performance problems, but they are blemishes that we would prefer not to have on top-tier products. Firmware improvements may be able to help these issues, but a lot of the brands selling Phison drives aren't very good about making firmware updates available to end users.
| PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Prices May 13, 2021 |
|||||||
| 480-512 GB | 960 GB-1 TB | 2 TB | |||||
| Inland Performance Plus Phison E18 |
$189.99 (19¢/GB) | $379.99 (19¢/GB) | |||||
| Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Phison E18 |
$199.98 (20¢/GB) | $449.15 (22¢/GB) | |||||
| Mushkin GAMMA Phison E18 |
$259.99 (26¢/GB) | $499.99 (25¢/GB) | |||||
| ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Innogrit IG5236 |
$179.99 (18¢/GB) | $349.99 (17¢/GB) | |||||
| Samsung 980 PRO Samsung Elpis |
$119.99 (24¢/GB) | $199.99 (20¢/GB) | $399.99 (20¢/GB) | ||||
| Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Phison E16 |
$89.98 (18¢/GB) | $159.98 (16¢/GB) | $399.99 (20¢/GB) | ||||
| WD Black SN850 WD G2 |
$128.74 (26¢/GB) | $199.99 (20¢/GB) | $399.99 (20¢/GB) | ||||
| ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite SM2267 (4ch) |
$139.99 (14¢/GB) | $259.99 (13¢/GB) | |||||
| PCIe 3.0 SSDs: | |||||||
| SK hynix Gold P31 | $74.99 (15¢/GB) | $134.99 (13¢/GB) | |||||
| Samsung 970 EVO Plus | $89.99 (18¢/GB) | $159.90 (16¢/GB) | $299.99 (15¢/GB) | ||||
| WD Black SN750 | $69.99 (14¢/GB) | $129.99 (13¢/GB) | $309.99 (15¢/GB) | ||||
Micro Center's in store only pricing for the Inland Performance Plus makes it the cheapest Phison E18 drive on the market, though Sabrent's more widely available Rocket 4 Plus is only $10 more for the 1TB model. With the exception of the Inland, most of the E18 drives seem to be priced at or above where the other second-wave PCIe 4.0 flagships are. The cheapest of the new PCIe 4.0 flagships is ADATA's Gammix S70 using Innogrit's controller. The older Phison E16 drives with TLC NAND are starting to get harder to find, but some such as the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 are a good mid-point between the latest top of the line drives and mainstream PCIe 3.0 drives.
For consumers with access to Micro Center's in-store pricing, the Inland Performance Plus is a reasonable choice since it's a bit cheaper than the flagships from Samsung and WD—but keep in mind that Micro Center is only offering a three year warranty rather than the usual five. For everyone else who has to deal with the online prices on other brands' Phison E18 drives, going for the WD Black SN850 instead makes more sense, especially for the 2TB models. The WD Black has more consistent performance and substantially less heat output.
However, all of the high-end PCIe 4.0 drives still carry a very steep price premium over even the best PCIe 3.0 drives. Recent increases in retail SSD prices have affected mainstream models more than the premium PCIe 4.0 drives, but the price gap is going to remain pretty wide. Those more mainstream models still provide almost as much real-world performance and a wider range of capacity options. Until a more compelling use case for PCIe 4.0 performance shows up, saving $50-100 by sticking with PCIe 3.0 storage seems like a great way to deal with high prices on other PC components.
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DominionSeraph - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
Try an optimized OS like XP. There's really no difference.philehidiot - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
I do actually have windows 95 installed as a VM, running off an SSD. If you want to really understand how bloated and sluggish Windows 10 is, try using Windows 95 and see how far they have regressed in pursuit of looking pretty.GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Even XP feels faster, on an older computer, than 10. Vista is where the sluggishness crept in.GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Also, software in general has become more sluggish, owing to excessive use of abstractions, frameworks, and modern languages.jospoortvliet - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Software has become vastly more complex as users demand more and more features and slick interfaces. Also, platforms evolve faster and more need to be supported. Developers have less time per feature so more abstractions and higher level languages are needed. You can't write code in a browser that is as efficient as good old assembly as it has to run everywhere and even if you could you would lose to a competitor who wrote more features with less developers....So yeah, you are right but it is a trend that is hard to reverse.
GeoffreyA - Friday, May 14, 2021 - link
Quite true, but one can't help feeling a pang of regret when looking at today's applications vs. those rare C/C++ Win32 ones that, as they say, just fly.FunBunny2 - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
"Quite true, but one can't help feeling a pang of regret when looking at today's applications vs. those rare C/C++ Win32 ones that, as they say, just fly."true fact. I used 1-2-3 pretty much from version 1, which is X86 assembler as was DOS. somewhere around 2.4 it was re-written in C (C++ didn't yet exist). the first time I fired up 2.4 1-2-3 (on a 640K 8088) what had been instant screen updates were now slow as molasses up hill in winter; you could see individual elements change, one by one.
it appears to be the fact that the constant push and pull between node shrink, more transistors, phatter cpu, more memory on the one hand and software bloat on the other doesn't balance out. I've always been sceptical of ever-increasing number of 'tiers' in the memory hierarchy paired with load-store architectures. may haps persistent memory will give us a true Single Level Storage that's more performant than just virtual storage/memory. have to work out a new version of transaction control, though.
GeoffreyA - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
Well, soon they'll need some big changes, when the quantum limits set by Nature are hit. As for the software, yes, it tends to get slower as time goes by. Any gains in hardware are quickly reversed. I think there's been a view inculcated against C++, instigated by Java perhaps, that it's not safe, it's bad, and so one needs to use a better, more modern language; or if C++, do things in an excessive object-oriented way, away from the lighter C sort of style. As in all of life, even "good" programming principles can be taken too far. So moderation is best.FunBunny2 - Saturday, May 15, 2021 - link
"if C++, do things in an excessive object-oriented way, away from the lighter C sort of style."C has been described as the universal assembler. pretty much true, esp. if you limit the description to the bare language w/o the many libraries. a C program can be blazingly fast, if the code treats the machine as a Control Program would. but that's how the PC World was nearly extinguished in the late 80s and early 90s by viruses of all kinds. I'm among those who spent more time than I wanted, editing with Norton Disk Doctor. not an era I miss.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, May 16, 2021 - link
Oh, yes, programs were doing their own thing, till OS's began to clamp down. As years went by, security got more attention too, as it should, and newer languages guaranteed different types of safety. An important point in this era where so much of our information is handled electronically. Or portability made easier, or maintenance.