Zotac SONIX 480GB PCIe SSD Review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 19 of 19 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

It surely is great where we are headed with NAND technologies ? I mean, face it ... a 'regular' SSD already is magic inside your PC compared to that dinosaur called HDD (which is stilll great for volume low access storage). But the year 2016 I feel will be the battle for form factors. Honestly, we needed SATA4 like last year already?, hence we see random spawns of other form factors like PCIe storage, M.2. and U.2. and that horrible Sata Express connector. Personally my money is on nVME M.2. and for those that do not have a m.2. slot, a PCI-Express SSDs like tested today. Granted your motherboard and CPU combo will need to support PCI-Express as it is a mandatory requirement for nVME. The good thing about nVME is that you can worry less about drivers as well, there has been NVMe support since Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 both include a native driver. Just pop it in and you can use it at full speed. As you have been able to see, the product offers seriously fast performance in both reads and writes relative to what you pay for it. At roughly 1 GB/s writes per seconds it is still twice as fast as any SATA3, while topping 2.5 GB/s reads and thus easily quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD. The new Zotac Sonix PCIe SSDs are overall fast, bloody fast. Combined with a 3 year warranty and guaranteed with strong endurance numbers you should be good to go for a long time. The endurance of this SSD is rated at 698 TB for its lifetime, that's massive. I mean, if you write say 20 GB a day / 365 days a year that would be 7.3 TB per year. So that's over 95 years worth of writes, surely the controller will have failed by then  though. So this is server grade endurance classification.

 

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Performance

Overall the Zotac Sonix storage units shine at many factors and on all levels really, IOPS performance is very good. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we think by far the best test in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiplied by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the Zotac Sonix is nuts, exceptionally good. Sustained read / write performance, again excellent albeit a hint lower than advertised. Read performance in particular leads and is top ranking. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy big MKV movies or do it all together, the Zotac Sonix is superb on these fronts. 

There is one massive remark to make, on both AS SSD and Anvil Storage synthetic tests with complex workloads, the perf for 4K write performance caved in dramatically. Up-to the point we are not yet sure anymore what is going on there.


Update:

  • Open Device Manager & Expand the Disk Drives
  • Right click on NVMe ZTSSDPG3-480 and click on Properties
  • Click on the Policies tab on top Check both boxes (Enable write caching on the device and Turn off 
  • Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device)
Problem solved.
 

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Overall NAND Storage Usage

Any SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series; if you copy a vast amount of compressed data, then the Sonix will perform seriously fast in performance. Make no mistake, replacing a HDD with an SSD in your PC eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That combined with the performance SATA3 / M.2 / mSATA offers these days is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2016.

Pricing & Warranty

Prioces then, the version with 480 GB costs 369 EUR = 0.72 EURO per GB

These are prices incl. VAT and based on street prices I found here in the Netherlands. The product is very hard to find at the time of writing this article though. You'll receive a three year carry-in warranty with this drive, which we feel is very comfortable albeit maybe five years would have been ther mor respectful thing to offer. But sure, three years is a lot in the technology arena.

 
 

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Concluding

We've been sayin'it for long time now. NAND is here to stay. It is very hard not to be impressed by what the Zotac Sonix is showing (aside from the two rather hefty anomalies with AS SSD and Anvil which we are sure off will be fixed with a future firmware update). Now obviously Zotac isn't making these products themselves, likely they purchase it at Phison or Toshiba and then brand + package it. Hey it happens everywhere but in the end you have a strong brand tied to what seems to be a seriously sexy product. In terms of relative performance to a SATA3 SSD you can easily quadruple your read performance. For writes that is double to triple the performance of today's SATA3 solutions. Now people ask me all the time, do you really notice the difference. It is a valid question, and truth be told it feels a split second faster but ... a SATA3 SSD already solved 90% of the issues with an HDD, hence in that last performance segment NAND is fighting each other. Currently the only consumer grade product that can compete here are OCZ RevoDrives, the Samsung 950  Pro and then a handful of PCIe SSD devices like the ones from G.Skill for example. There are some requirements for proper utilization though. You do need to use the right combination of OS/UEFI motherboard and CPU, we do recommend X79/X99 and Z97/Z170 here. Also you might have a PCI-Express 3.0 motherboards, but if the slot is toed to the PCH (motherboard chipset) then often they dumb down to 2.0 over a DMI link. These are all variables you need to take into account. Check with your motherboard manufacturers if the board can proper four PCI-Express lanes (Gen 3.0) and NVMe. Almost all of the above mentioned motherboards will do that after a firmware update.

You will receive a three year carry-in warranty with this product that is rated at almost 700 TB written, that is an incredibly high rating. Whatever you are planning with this storage unit, you are good to go from gaming, overall net PC usage (albeit overkill) to video transcoding and editing and content creation, this is one of the fastest SSD series available for I/O intensive workloads (consumer grade that is). The Zotac Sonix 480 PCIe SSD deserves a top pick award as it is exactly that, a top pick, other then that if your motherboard supports it, recommended of course. 

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