The SK Hynix Gold S31 SATA SSD Review: Hynix 3D NAND Finally Shows Up

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

On the Light test, the SK Hynix Gold S31 SSDs all show decent overall performance, including when the test is run on a full drive. They aren't the fastest SATA drives to complete the test, but they trail by single-digit percentages.

Average and 99th percentile latency is great for the larger two S31 models. The average latency for the 250GB model is a bit higher than for its larger siblings, but it's still ahead of the DRAMless drives. The 99th percentile latency score for the 250GB S31 is bad news: it's almost twice as bad as the DRAMless SSDs, though thankfully the S31's performance doesn't completely fall to pieces if the test is run on a full drive

The average read latencies from the S31 drives is unremarkable. For reads, the 250GB model does stick out a bit from this crowd, but it isn't as much of an outlier as the DRAMless models.

As with average read and write latencies, the 99th percentile latency subscores show that the S31 isn't really a problem for reads, and it is a minor issue for writing to the drive.

The SK Hynix Gold S31 drives are essentially tied with the DRAMless SSDs for lowest energy usage over the course of the Light test.