Techman SSD XC100 Series NVMe SSD Review (3.2TB)

POWER CONSUMPTION

For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.

When enterprise class storage is deployed, not only one or two drives are set out in a deployment, hundreds to thousands are, therefore, when booting a NAS or SAN it is important to ensure the power sources will be able to provide enough power to the systems. First we look at how much power the device needs during startup. Next we look at idle power consumption and workload averages at a QD of 256. This helps us gauge IOPS per Watt.

Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings.

Overall, we can see that power consumption is not as well-regulated as the other test pool offerings. Idle power consumption is better than the 8W spec and average consumption results are in line as well with results in the low to mid 20W range. These results, however, are about 20% higher than that of the HGST SN100 unfortunately. Also, while we are showing results of an SSD with half the capacity on Intel’s side, looking at the results of the DC P3700 we see just how good of a job they have done in tuning the power regulation of their product. Across the board it consumes much less power than the PMC Flashtec powered devices!

Now, looking at the IOPS per Watt under workloads we can see that the Techman XC100 is the most inefficient SSD of the group. The Intel DC P3700, undoubtedly, is the most efficient except for during sequential writes, where the HGST SN100 takes the crown.

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

Looking back at the Techman XC100’s performance testing results we can see that they are a bit mixed. During 4K, 8K, and sequential read workloads it was able to match and even beat out the rest of our test pool. It achieved nearly 740K IOPS read and 120K IOPS write at the 4K file size and 390K IOPS read and 60K IOPS write at the 8KB file size. During sequential testing, it delivered performance just under the rated spec of 3,200MB/s, hitting 3,180MB/s read and bested its write spec of 1.4GB/s with nearly 100MB/s more throughput, reaching 1.5GB/s.

Due to lower write performance, however, the Techman XC100 lagged behind both the Intel DC P3700 and HGST SN100 (featuring the same controller) during most of the server workload tests. It reached 118,091 IOPS under the database test, 100,753 IOPS under the email server test, and 89,344 IOPS under the file server test. When we reached the web server test the XC100 finally turned out a victory by reaching 185,359 IOPS.

Finally, when looking at the Techman XC100’s power consumption results, much like its mixed workload results, it also lagged behind the test pool. While consumption was in line with the published specifications by Techman, the XC100 is less efficient than other SSDs in the market. We were told, however, that they have now phased in a changed design on NAND Vcc to lower the consumption level about 2-3W in average in order to be more competitive.

Though it has awesome average speeds and latency results, there was an issue with its ability to deliver tight consistency and a reliable QoS on writes. With many outlier results that are much slower than the average it cannot keep up with some of the other, more established high performance SSD options out there in that regard. This was also apparent in the server application tests as they further revealed that during write heavy and mixed workloads, there is room for improvement in firmware development for consistency and QoS.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Techman is a new player in the enterprise storage game and their first product, the XC100, definitely delivers a lot of performance. Through seeing these results, we can also see part of the beauty that the PMC Flashtec NVMe controller has to offer third-party vendors with its highly customizable firmware. This is now the third time we have tested a product featuring it and it is interesting to see how this controller can deliver such different results under multiple competing products. Techman tweaked the XC100’s performance to be more optimized when performing read centric tasks, while in comparison, the HGST SN100 was tweaked to deliver better write performance results as well as performance under mixed workloads. We can see that PMC’s Flashtec NVMe controller enables great performance out of the box, but it is the team behind the end-product that is responsible for its unique performance characteristics through their own firmware development. As of now we do know that Techman are looking into improving the XC100’s consistency.

Techman SSD XC100 features all the enterprise class features you could ask for. End-to-end data path protection multiple data integrity features such as BCH ECC and RAID on NAND as well as optional AES security support ensure data is safe and secure once these SSDs are deployed. Not only that, but with XC100 SSD’s availability in both U.2 and HHHL AIC form factors with cMLC and eMLC variants, the XC100 series offers purchasing managers multiple options tailored to their specific need. Techman are even adding more diversity to their product portfolio with the release of an XC200 series SSD featuring dual port support for high availability in June.

Unfortunately, we did not gain any knowledge on pricing, but we can say that the Techman XC100 will be facing some stiff competition from the many well established competitors in the market. It will be interesting to see how things go for them from here. To learn more about Techman SSD, pricing, and what they and their products have to offer, be sure to check out their website at TM-SSD.com