Page 10 - Benchmark: PCMark 8
About PCMark 8
PCMark 8 is the latest version in our series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of PC, from tablets to desktops. With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is the complete PC benchmark for home and business.
From: Developer's Page
PCMark 8 Storage Consistency Test is one of our favorite benchmarks, but also one of the more taxing ones too. Nowadays, many drives are well optimized for high benchmark scores when they are empty, but what separates the professional players from the amateurs is how it stands up to a truly punishing workload. PCMark 8's Storage Consistency Test is designed exactly for this purpose. Going through five phases -- precondition, degradation, steady state, recovery, and clean up -- to extend beyond real world application simulations, this benchmark takes around two days to complete, but the results are revealing of a SSD's true capabilities.
Up to this point, the Crucial P1 1TB showed off impressive numbers, but majority of the results were given with the drive empty. With QLC and its heavy reliance on its SLC write cache, we can see how performance drops off like a rock when the drive starts filling up. The graph was pretty good at showing this dramatic drop off, especially when we see the results between the first and last stages of the degradation tests. Furthermore, you can see how the numbers "recovered" near the end of the benchmark and how low and flat they were in the steady state. If you look at our first graph, which compares the Crucial SSD against one of its own, the MX500 500GB, the SATA-based drive may have had lower peak numbers, but it was by far the more consistent performer across all of the stages. Furthermore, its steady state benchmarks were more than double the speed on average. Compared to the WD Black NVMe 1TB SSD, the results were not even close, with the triple-level cell NAND being a lot more consistent than the quad-level cells we have here. To be fair, P1 1TB still takes care of DRAM-less solutions like the Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD, though the numbers were much closer than I would have expected. Again, this benchmark does not simulate everyday use cases for consumers, but it does illustrate the shortcomings of the newest cost-cutting measure that is in QLC NAND.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
