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 500GB showed off favorable 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 two Crucial P1 SSDs against each other. Both of them show off the same characteristics, but at different magnitudes. Immediately, you can see how the smaller capacity translates into a smaller SLC cache, and thus how it falls off the peak speeds faster than with the larger drive. 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. In our final graph, we can see how the P1 500GB behaves similarly to the DRAM-less solutions like the Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD when the drive has more of its capacity filled. Again, this benchmark does not simulate everyday use cases for consumers, but it does illustrate the disadvantages of 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
