SPECworkstation 3.0.2 Storage Benchmark
SPECworkstation benchmark is an excellent benchmark to test systems using workstation-type workloads. In this test, we only ran the Storage component, which is fifteen separate tests.
SPECworkstation results for the Fanxiang S660 are unimpressive, but not particularly terrible either. In my opinion, a budget drive turning in middle-of-the-road type performance is a solid result.
Sustained Write Performance
This is not necessarily a benchmark so much as trying to catch the post-cache write speed of the drive. While I am filling the drive with data to the 85% mark with ten simultaneous write threads, I monitor the drive for the write performance to dip to the lowest steady point and grab a screenshot.
I think everyone who has read my drive reviews over time was expecting this one. The S660 has pretty poor post-cache write speed. This is by no means the worst I have ever seen, but given this is a 4TB drive it seemed to take forever to populate the drive for testing. For the target market of users for this drive, this will probably not be a huge deal as smaller writes complete in reasonable amounts of time.
Temperatures
We monitored the idle and maximum temperature during testing with HWMonitor to get some idea of the thermal performance and requirements of the drive.
Unlike the S770 and S880, the temperatures resulting from HWMonitor are honest, which I verified via my FLIR.
The S660 topped out at 65C, which is a reasonable temperature, and at no point did I appear to encounter thermal throttling. During the large sustained write test temperatures actually dropped quite a bit lower than 65C, because the write speed slowed down to such a low point the drive was able to cool off some.
Final Words
The Fanxiang S660 4TB is available on Amazon for $158, which includes the heatsink and M.2 screw. That pricing is very low, and as far as I can tell is the least expensive Gen 4 4TB drive on the market. The only price competitor it has is the Silicon Power UD90 4TB, which we have also purchased and will be reviewing in the future. Almost all of the other Gen 4 4TB drives are $200 or more, though many of those are 7 GB/s drives and not 5 GB/s drives, and most are TLC and not QLC so there are some differentiators.
On the performance side, this is one where we saw two very different drives. Normally people buy a drive and post clean drive benchmarks of a platform. Likewise, many sites out there do the same. At the same time, most people are buying 4TB capacity because they expect to use more than 2TB consistently. Once we got to that more real-world fill level, the performance of the drive drastically changed. It is a big reason we test how we do on STH.
The performance of the S660 is not the most impressive. It has little to no brand name recognition to help itself out. This drive has two things going for it; it is big and it is cheap. For a lot of people in the world – myself included in most of my personal life – capacity will trump performance. The fact is that I can spend my $160 and get either this 4TB drive or someone else’s 2TB drive. Shopping online, that is how many will view the choice. If capacity per dollar is your benchmark, then the Fanxiang S660 should be a drive to look at.
Where to Buy
Here is an Amazon Affiliate link to the drive that we may earn a small commission from if you purchase the drive:
To me it looks like the S660 is suffering from significant write amplification after its used up its SLC cache. Could that be the result of a firmware bug?
My emulators are currently on an old mechanical drive and I’ve recently been getting HD and 4K texture packs for my old PS2 and GameCube games and the mechanical drive just isn’t great for loading these new texture packs so I figured I’d grab a regular 2.5″ SSD. I was thinking about going with a 4TB just for the extra space to also install my PC games to. While searching I find that 4TB SATA SSDs are going for roughly the same price as this NVMe drive.
Seeing as how read speeds are more important for my use case I feel like this S660 from fanxiang, not to mention that the when the write speeds tank its pretty much at the levels of a SATA SSD anyway.