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MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro (480GB)
Pros:
- Great sequential performance
- Class leading endurance ratings
- Good power efficiency
Cons:
- Lower than average application performance
Verdict: The BPX Pro is a great SSD for prosumers and media content creators. The drive offers a good balance of power efficiency, comes with a five-year warranty, and given its competitive pricing, it delivers an impressive performance to endurance ratio.
Rating: ★★★★
Comparison Products
We have the Intel SSD 760p and Adata XPG SX8200, both of which come equipped with Silicon Motion Inc. (SMI) controllers, in our test pool. We also included the Samsung 970 EVO and Toshiba RC100, both of which have proprietary controllers. The Plextor M9Pe features a Marvell controller and 3D TLC flash. We also threw in the BPX Pro’s E7-powered predecessor, the BPX, and its slower counterpart the SBX, which has a Phison E8 controller.
Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0
PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.
The 480GB BPX Pro scored 5062 points and an average bandwidth of 462MB/s. While this is a sizable lead against the lower-end PCIe 3.0 x2 SBX and RC100, it trails the other PCIe 3.0 x4 devices, including the previous-gen BPX.
Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV
The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.
The BPX Pro again landed behind its predecessor, the BPX. The total load time of 21.93 seconds was pretty fast, but it wasn't as good as the other drives in the test pool.
Transfer Rates – DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a read test of a newly-written 6 GB file.
The BPX Pro outperformed the SBX by 2 MB/s and M9Pe by 3 MB/s during the copy test, but it didn't surpass any of the other drives. Surprisingly, the Toshiba RC100 took a sizeable 36 MB/s lead over the BPX Pro.
The BPX Pro's 2,245 MB/s read speed ranked second to the 970 EVO during the test.
SYSmark 2014 SE
Like PCMark, SYSmark uses real applications to measure system performance. SYSmark takes things much further, however. It utilizes fourteen different applications to run real workloads with real data sets to measure how overall system performance impacts the user experience. BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE installs a full suite of applications for its tests, which includes Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Corel WinZip, several Adobe software applications, and GIMP. That also makes it a great test to measure the amount of time it takes to install widely-used programs after you install a fresh operating system.
MyDigitalSSD’s BPX Pro installed SYSmark slightly faster than the BPX, but it was six minutes faster than the 2TB HDD.
The BPX Pro notched a decent responsiveness score but trailed the BPX and almost every other NVMe SSD.
ATTO
ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.
The BPX Pro only managed to pull off 2GB/s of write throughput, which allows the older BPX to take the lead. The BPX Pro dominated again with 3.45 GB/s of read bandwidth.
Anvil's Storage Utilities
Anvil's Storage Utility is a commonly-referenced benchmark that simplifies the complex IOMETER benchmark and its underlying Dynamo engine with a one-click software wrapper.
The BPX Pro lagged the 970 EVO by a large margin, but only trailed the SX8200 and M9Pe slightly.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file size benchmarking tool.
The BPX Pro took second place in sequential read and write speed at QD1 and 32. Zooming in on QD1-8 4K performance, we can see that the BPX Pro delivered middling read performance and nearly led in write throughput.
Sustained Sequential Write Performance
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement an SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the SLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We hammer the SSDs with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the SLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.
The BPX Pro has a 30GB SLC write cache, meaning it is very similar to the Samsung 970 EVO. But the Samsung 970 EVO has a faster buffer and delivers better sustained write performance. Here, the BPX Pro's SLC buffer averaged 2GB/s of throughput, which dropped to 615MB/s after the buffer was saturated.
Power Consumption
We use the Quarch XLC Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.
Phison also appears to have power consumption under control. The drive supports the frugal APST, ASPM, and L1.2 power saving modes.
During the 50GB file copy test, MyDigitalSSD’s BPX Pro averaged 2.46W, which is great compared to the other drives. We recorded a maximum of just 4.44W, which was lower than most of the other drives in the comparison pool.
The low average and maximum power consumption numbers led to a solid 92MB/s per watt. At idle, the BPX Pro ranked first overall with ASPM disabled and came in third with the feature enabled.
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