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

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy

Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.

As with The Destroyer, the SK Hynix Gold S31 drives have somewhat lower performance on the Heavy test than most other mainstream SATA models, but they do an excellent job of retaining that performance even when the drive is full.

The average latencies from the S31s are reasonable and minimally affected by running the test on a full drive. For the 99th percentile latencies, the scores are actually slightly better when the drives are full, but the 500GB model in particular is a bit behind the usual for its capacity class.

The average read latencies from the S31s during the Heavy test are competitive. For writes, the 500GB model's latency is a little bit high compared to the competition. The 250GB model's average write latency is almost double that level, but still lower than that of the DRAMless Toshiba TR200.

The 99th percentile read and write latencies are both fine for the larger S31 models. The 250GB model's 99th percentile read latency gets shown up by the DRAMless Toshiba TR200 when the test is run on an empty drive. However, even the smallest S31 doesn't come close to the 99th percentile write latency problems that affect the DRAMless drives.

All three capacities of the SK Hynix Gold S31 turn in great power efficiency scores on the Heavy test, using substantially less energy than the competing mainstream models with DRAM caches.