SK hynix Canvas SL301 500GB SSD Review

SK Hynix have been actively targeting the SSD market in 2015 and their new models hit our labs in recent weeks. Their new SL301 Canvas Solid State Drive is built on the 16nm process and promises very high levels of overall performance. This triple level cell solid state drive will be offered in both 250GB and 500GB capacities and today we look at the larger model in the family. SK hynix, to give them their full name, is a South Korean semiconductor specialist that was established in 1983 and it has over 17,000 employees spread across a number of sites. Technically, it was born out of Hyundai (HYundai electroNICS) and it bought the Maxtor hard drive company in 1993. Behind rival Samsung, SK hynix claims to be the world’s second largest memory chip maker and sixth biggest semiconductor company overall. At some stage or another, every major player on the planet is likely to have used SK hynix memory modules – including IBM (System X servers), Asus (Nexus 7) and Apple (some MacBook and MacBook Pro models). The SK hynix solid state drive arrives in a stylish little box - with canvas style artwork all around it. It is very cool. Remove the stickers on the box and you are tied into the SK hynix warranty policy. The 2.5 inch drive is encased inside an anti static bag and it is placed on a cardboard riser. Much of the space of the box is unused - no fancy extras included - just a 'user instruction' guide. As you would expect there is not much in this but for very inexperienced users it might prove useful. SK hynix have not changed their enclosure - which is good as I think it is fantastic looking. It is a completely tool less design too and while we wouldn't advise it, you can open the drive by pulling on the sides if you can get your fingernail between the top and bottom pieces. If you are using a screwdriver, some care is required. While I said the enclosure hadn't changed, this is not completely true. The other drives we have reviewed in the SC300 range have had a red plastic strip running around the edges of the chassis. The SL301 is different as SK hynix have opted for more subdued red plastic corners. Opening the drive we can see this plastic frame in its full glory. We do find the small touches on the design rather appealing. The SK hynic SL301 differs from the earlier SC300 drives - in that it is a smaller PCB inside the chassis - half length. The NAND flash is on both sides this time, rather than one. To most customers this information is irrelevant, they will never open the chassis in the first place to notice the tiny PCB. On the PCB is the SK hynix controller supported with a DDR2 cache chip and eight 16nm NAND chips. We formatted the SK hynix SL301 500GB in Windows 10, and it left 465GB free for use. 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. We have recently updated this particular test rig with the Windows 10 64 bit operating system. Main system: Kitguru Test Rig 3 Other Drives Micron M600 256GB Apotop S3C 256GB Angelbird 512GB wrk Hynix SH920/910A OCZ ARC 100 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Intel 520 Series 240GB Intel 730 240GB Samsung 840 EVO 1TB OCZ Vector 150 256GB OCZ Vector 240GB OCZ Vertex 450 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (1.4 fw) ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SDD SanDisk Extreme II 240GB Corsair Performance Pro 256GB OCZ Agility 4 256GB SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB Samsung 830 Series 512GB Patriot Wildfire 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS ADATA S510 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB OCZ Octane 512GB (fw 1.13) Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 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. Overall delivery is very strong, showing strong sequential read and write throughput and excellent 4KQD32 performance. This drive handles compressible and incompressible data equally well, which will help in certain environments - such as when dealing with large video files and images. Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed. 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. Read performance is class leading - saturating the SATA 3 interface and delivering 564MB/s. Write performance is also very strong, hitting just under 500MB/s. Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today. 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. AS SSD deals exclusively with incompressible data, and we can see the SK hynix proprietary controller performs very well in this situation. The performance figures from this particular test show that this drive is actually top of our chart - behind the Raid 0 tests. Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months. 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 often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. IOPS performance is fantastic scoring almost 95k in the 4k random read test and 85k in the random write test. This positions the drive right at the top of our chart, producing the most consistent results. We have reviewed all of the SK hynix SC300 series of Solid State drives in recent months, but this is the first drive Kitguru has analysed that comes from their new SL300 series. As we have noted before the proprietary SK hynix controller is able to deal with compressible and incompressible data without suffering performance degradation. The SK hynix Canvas SL301 500GB drive will saturate the SATA III interface when it comes to sequential read performance, and sequential write performance rates just shy of 500 MB/s. Some leading competitor drives will be able to push through 550MB/s+ when performing read and write functions however the SL301 manages to deliver stellar performance when dealing with random 4K data streams. Our results indicate that considering the price point, the SL301 rates up there with the finest drives on the market when dealing with random 4K data. You can buy the SK hynix Canvas SL301 drives from Amazon HERE. The 250GB model is priced at £67.50 and the 500GB model is priced at £136.07. Scan also have stock of the drives at the same price HERE. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: Sk hynix controller is equally good with incompressible and compressible data. class leading 4k random IOPS performance. we love the tool less chassis design. good warranty terms. Cons: So much competition on the market in 2015. Kitguru says: The SL301 500GB is a great looking drive that proves beauty is not just skin deep. Technically the drive is a solid performer in all areas and it manages to outclass most competitor drives when it comes to dealing with random 4K data.