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Already well known as a manufacturer of Flash NAND, SK hynix are certainly working on ramping up their presence in the SSD market with their own drives. Hard on the heels of the Enterprise-focused SE3010 that we examined recently comes the latest addition to the Canvas consumer range – the SL308. Aimed more towards the entry level end of the consumer space, the SL308 uses low-cost TLC memory in combination with an SK hynix controller.
At the time of writing the SL308 range consists of three capacities; 120GB, 250GB, and the flagship 500GB. The official performance figures for the 500GB drive are up to 560MB/s & 490MB/s for sequential reads and writes, respectively. Random 4K figures are up to 100,000 IOPS for reads and 85,000 IOPS for writes.
The 500GB drive has a quoted endurance figure of 150TBW and SK hynix back the drive with a three-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB
NAND Components: SK hynix 16nm TLC
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III)
Form Factor: 2.5in, 7mm
NAND Controller: SK hynix SH87820BB
Dimensions: 100 x 70 x 7 mm
Firmware Version 30000P10
Usually, the box that an SSD ships in never gets much of a second glance as it's ripped open to get to the contents. But credit to SK hynix – the box that the SL308 comes in is a stylish little number. As befitting for a product line called Canvas, the sturdy box is covered in a canvas design artwork. It's a very nice touch.
As for extras in the box, well you don't get any.
The SL308 is built on a standard 2.5in, 7mm format and is built into a metal case with red plastic corners
The reason for the red corners becomes apparent once the clips that hold the enclosure together are released. They are part of an inner plastic cage that supports the PCB. The PCB itself is very compact and doesn't come anywhere close to filling the enclosure.
All the components of the SL308 are built on one side of the PCB, and all are SK hynix products. There are four 16nm 128GB TLC NAND packages (labelled H27QITDQEM6A) making up the drive's capacity, as well as an SH87820BB 8-channel controller and a single LPDDR2 cache chip.
SK hynix's SSD management software is called Drive Manager Easy Kit. With it you can monitor the life of the drive, its temperature, check the SMART details and diagnose any problems with the drive. It also allows the drive's firmware to be updated and to be securely erased or sanitized.
The one thing that is missing from the package is a cloning tool but never fear, one is available as a separate download. However, it would be nice to see it included in the Drive Manager software in the not too distant future.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Intel Core i7 4790K with 16GB of DDR3-2133 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an ASRock Z97 Extreme 6 motherboard.
Other drives
Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB
Crucial BX100 500GB
Crucial MX100 512GB
Crucial MX200 500GB
Intel SSD730 480GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 480GB
OCZ Trion 100 480GB
OCZ Trion 150 480GB
Patriot Ignite 480GB
PNY CS2111 XLR8 480GB
Samsung 830 512GB
Samsung 840DC EVO 480GB
Samsung 840DC PRO 400GB
SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB
Seagate 600 480GB
SK hynix Canvas SL300 512GB
SK hynix Canvas SL301 500GB
Toshiba THNSNF512GCSS 512GB
Transcend SSD220S 480GB
Transcend SSD370S 512GB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
The SL308 deals with fairly deep queue depths very well and is faster than the previous SL301 drive particularly when it comes to 4K Q32 writes. As can be seen from the two benchmark results, the controller has no real preference for what type of data it's dealing with.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
SK hynix quote sequential read/write performance figures for the 500GB version of the SL308 as up to 560MB/s for reads and 490MB/s writes. The ATTO benchmark backed up these figures as the tested drive produced 564MB/s for reads and 500MB/s for writes, which is a considerable chunk faster than the official write figure.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive.
AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The 500GB SL308 shows pretty strong 4K performance at deeper queue depths for both reads and writes. The 4K write performance at shallower depths is also pretty good. Not so strong is the 4K read performance at a shallow queue depth.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
The official 4K random figures for the drive are up to 100,000 IOPS for reads and 85,000 IOPS for writes. Under test conditions using the IOMeter benchmark we got close to that maximum read figure with 97,570 IOPS, but the writes were some way off that maximum figure at just 76,829 IOPS.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
The drive has no problems dealing with our real life file transfer tests, showing a good turn of speed throughout the tests. That said, it does drop back a little when reading the small bity files of the 50GB file folder .
SK hynix are probably still better known for producing the chips inside other manufacturers' SSDs, but the company has taken major steps in recent months to raise market awareness for their own drives.
The SL308 can be seen more as a refresh of the previous SL301 than anything radically new. While it looks identical to its sibling, it uses a newer controller and denser TLC NAND; the 500GB SL301 used eight NAND packages, the SL308 uses just four to get to the same capacity.
SK hynix quote sequential read/write figures for the drive as 560MB/s & 490MB/s respectively – figures which were confirmed by the ATTO benchmark. When tested, the drive produced a figure of 564MB/s which is the same figure as the SL301. Writes came in at 500MB/s which is considerably faster than the official figure and slightly faster than the SL301.
When it came to random 4K performance the SL308 produced a mixed bag of results. The official figure for reads is up to 100,000 IOPS which is very good for a TLC based drive. Under the IOMeter benchmark, the review sample produced a read score of 97,570 IOPS – a little way off the official figure but still very good. The tested write figure of 76,829 IOPS was some way behind the official 85,000 IOPS rating.
SK hynix's drive management software is a very useful download. It may not be as comprehensive as competitor software (such as that available from Samsung) but it is intuitive and stable. That said, we do feel that the cloning tool should be integrated into the main package rather than available as a separate download.
The drive has a guide price of £120 inc. VAT in the UK. Scan currently have stock for £112.99 inc. VAT.
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Pros
- Solid overall performance.
- Competitive price.
Cons
- 4K random write performance is behind the claims, based on our test method.
Kitguru says: The 500GB SL308 is aimed at a tough market segment and SK hynix have given the drive a good chance with its competitive price.
