Enterprise video streaming is becoming a much more demanding workload within the enterprise space. Companies want more HD streams with higher bit-rates and no stuttering. A storage solution well-suited for enterprise-class video delivery has completely different capabilities than something designed for databases. At the end of the day, you're basically looking for exceptional large-block sequential write performance. You also need a high level of consistency that traditionally isn't seen from consumer SSDs. For a more in-depth analysis, take a look at our Intel SSD 910 review.
As a refresher, once the drive is in a steady state, we write its entire capacity 100 times. We use 8 MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of four, recording timestamps for each individual write. The graph below reflects 100-point averaging so that you can better visualize the results.
Frankly, we were shocked after our first look at the data. So much so, in fact, that instead of our usual 100 full writes, we went all the way up to 250. That's over 160 TB of data written to the P320h, including over 20 million individual 8 MB writes. The graph below shows the best- and worst-case runs out of those 250 iterations.

And that's it. Two minor hiccups, each of which is easy to overcome with a modest buffer. Because we are testing the P320h as a formatted drive, just as you would use it in the real-world, it's impossible to even say what caused those dips. They could have very well been from the driver or operating system doing some periodic check on the hardware. The table below shows how much memory would be required to maintain a given threshold.
| Threshold (MB/s) | Best-Case Buffer Size In MB | Worst-Case Buffer Size In MB |
|---|---|---|
| 1850 | 26 | 53 |
| 1900 | 34 | 66 |
| 1950 | 40 | 79 |
| 2000 | 52 | 92 |
| 2025 | 6310 | 6815 |
These are not normal results, particularly for an SSD. Typically, solid-state storage has issues where, in a very small percentage of writes, the operation takes an order of magnitude longer to complete. This is normally attributed to internal SSD tasks like garbage collection. Because those background operations are inherent and unavoidable, this sort of testing is necessary to measure how the outliers negatively affect streaming performance.
The P320h is such a consistent performer, though, that it needs almost no buffer up to and beyond its rated performance. Normally, when you go beyond the average, the required buffer grows exponentially. But the P320h goes from almost no buffer at 2,000 MB/s, to an unrealistically-high number just 25 MB/s higher.
Based on our maximum latency performance test, these results probably shouldn't come as a shock. But the fact that the consistency held up over such a long period of time certainly surprised us.
- Meet Micron's P320h PCI Express-Based SSD
- Micron's 32-Channel Controller Simplifies PCIe-Based SSDs
- Micron's Firmware And Monitoring Software
- Test Setup, Benchmarks, And Methodology
- Measuring Write Endurance: SLC Wins Again
- 4 KB Random Performance
- Enterprise Workload Performance
- Sequential Performance
- Enterprise Video Streaming Performance
- Power Consumption
- Micron's RealSSD P320h: The Future Of Enterprise-Class SSDs?
Such an apples to oranges comparison...
It using SLC and geared towards enterprise market...
IMO it understandable price...
Such an apples to oranges comparison...
Kinda surprised something like this didn't come out first as it makes more sense....
really ? Increasingly, performance is basically dependent on extracting parallelism. Whether in storage or in CPU performance.
Desktop/Mainstream users just dont do so much in parallel that they can fully use all the hardware.
I see a purpose for 16 core processors. How are we going to otherwise be able to run Crysis 6?
Use a 5000 core GPU ?
????????!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks for the review, love to see this kind of advancement and a peak into the future new hardware brings with it, even if it isn't directly applicable to me at this point in time.
Can you put two of them in RAID0 ??
Signed,
Bonkers
It using SLC and geared towards enterprise market...
IMO it understandable price...
Eh, depending on how far in the future we're talking about, neither of those statements is iron-clad. In the case of a 16-core processor, it's pretty much guaranteed that we will eventually see one in the consumer space, at mainstream prices. Whether the extra cores on that CPU will offer any compelling benefit to the mainstream consumer is an open question, but at least those cores do offer meaningful performance benefits to hardcore multi-taskers.
Similarly, current consumer-grade SSDs offer very nearly instantaneous responsiveness already -- unless the user attempts to perform multiple disk-intensive tasks simultaneously. But who knows what the future holds? You could make a case that current enterprise-grade SSDs (or something similar to them) are far more likely to make a meaningful mark on the consumer market years from now than 16-core processors, because the benefits of CPU parallelism are limited in principle. By contrast, the benefit of storage speed is only limited by the speed of the components that rely on it; storage speed applies both to singular and parallel tasks.
That said, I agree with your sentiment if not with the particulars of your argument: my gut reaction to the article was that although 3.2 GB/sec is a very impressive number, I already feel like I'm flying at the ~0.5 GB/sec (at best) that I get out of my Intel 330. From the consumer perspective, performance comparisons between different SSDs almost always seem to me materially irrelevant, so it's hard to get too excited about the performance of an enterprise-grade SSD, even in the abstract.
Still, this is a worthy review of an interesting product. Appreciate the insight.
1989... 1MB of memory chips (card extra) was $100 wholesale !
We sold them by the boat load for Amiga computers.
And yes, that is 1 MegaByte...
an 8MB card retailed for $1,800 (and that's in 1989 Dollars).
I am glad you find it useful, it is something that I have always cared about and tested because I have been burned in the past.