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Real-World Software Performance
PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance
For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.
Other than Samsung's 1TB 850 EVO, the 960GB BP5e is the only other TLC-based SSD on our charts. The 850 EVO is a mainstream drive, not a true entry-level contender. With that in mind, it's hardly surprising to see MyDigitalSSD's offering trailing most of the other products we're comparing it to. When you take price into consideration, the BP5e holds up pretty well.
Total Storage Bandwidth
When you look at the combined results in throughput, the BP5e only trails Crucial's BX100 1TB by a small margin. The BX100 was a popular low-cost SSD from the time it was released last April until it was discontinued at the end of November. It launched at $375, and its price crept up to $399 where it sits now. In contrast, the somewhat slower BP5e sells for $240.
PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance
To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.
Given the BP5e's strong emphasis on low cost, we're not too worried about how it fares under heavy workloads. Of the drives tested, it falls somewhere in the middle when we hit it with moderately-demanding benchmarks. In this test environment, drives have less time to recover. Some manufacturers perform background clean-up activities on their drives right away, while others wait until the last few pages are dirty. When clean-up begins, latency increases, reducing measurable throughput. The S10 controller's core count advantage helps under these conditions, nudging the BP5e upon our chart to outperform generally faster SATA SSDs.
Service Time
This is where we really get to the benefit of four cores under moderate workloads (we're also mimicking what performance is like when the drive is almost full). Gamers who install everything to their boot drive should think about this before buying an SSD. after all, nobody snags a 1TB-class drive to leave it mostly empty.
Notebook Battery Life
For more information on how we test notebook battery life, click here.
It's hard to complain about the battery life numbers turned in by the BP5e, but we did expect a little more. We've come to understand that drives with emulated SLC caches tend to fare a little better than straight MLC-equipped SSDs. SanDisk's Extreme Pro—shown at the top of the chart—is a good example. It uses a proprietary SanDisk technology called nCache, which is basically a single-level cell buffer.
