Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB NVMe SSD Review

Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe Performance

For this, we are going to run through a number of workloads just to see how the drive performs. We would also like to provide some easy screenshots of the desktop tool so you can see the results quickly and easily compared to other drives you may have.

CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 x64

CrystalDiskMark is used as a basic starting point for benchmarks as it is something commonly run by end-users as a sanity check. Here is the smaller 1GB test size:

Here is the larger 8GB test size:

In the event you want to see a side-by-side, here they are:

Overall, you can certainly see this is a drive focused on heavier reads than writes.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO Disk Benchmark has been a staple of drive sequential performance testing for years. ATTO was tested at both 256MB and 8GB file sizes.

Here is the 8GB result:

For those who want to see the results compared side-by-side:

Here the ATTO results show that we have a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD that is closer to saturating the bus on the sequential read rather than sequential write side.

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD Benchmark is another good benchmark for testing SSDs. We run all three tests for our series. Like other utilities, it was run with both the default 1GB as well as a larger 10GB test set.

Here is the 10GB test size:

Again, here is the side-by-side.

AS SSD is one of those where it is probably worth pointing out that this is, again, not designed for super-fast 4K random performance. Instead, it is designed for applications like video storage.

Next, let us get into some of our Linux-based benchmarking.

Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB Four Corners Performance

Our first test was to see sequential transfer rates and 4K random IOPS performance for the SSD. Please excuse the smaller-than-normal comparison set. In the next section, you will see why we have a reduced set. The main reason is that we swapped to a multi-architectural test lab. We test these in more than 20 different processor architectures spanning PCIe Gen4 and Gen5. Still, we wanted to take a look at the performance of the drives.

Here is the 4K random read-and-write performance:

Overall, the 4K numbers are not what we might call “great” but that is what we expected since that is not the focus of this drive. The sequential numbers are actually not bad compared to other PCIe Gen4 NVMe drives.

Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB Application Performance Comparison

For our application testing performance, we are still using AMD EPYC.

As you can see, there are a lot of variabilities here in terms of how much impact the SSD has on application performance. Let us go through and discuss the performance drivers.

On the NVIDIA T4 MobileNet V1 script, we see very little performance impact on the AI workload, but we see some. The key here is that the performance of the NVIDIA T4 mostly limits us, and storage is not the bottleneck. We have a NVIDIA L4 that we are going to use with an updated model in the future. Here we can see a benefit to the newer drives in terms of performance, but it is not huge. That is part of the overall story. Most reviews of storage products are focused mostly on lines, and it may be exciting to see sequential throughput double in PCIe Gen3 to PCIe Gen4, and double again from Gen4 to Gen5, but in many real workloads, the stress of a system is not solely in the storage.

Likewise, our Adobe Media Encoder script is timing copy to the drive, then the transcoding of the video file, followed by the transfer off of the drive. Here, we have a bigger impact because we have some larger sequential reads/ writes involved, the primary performance driver is the encoding speed. The key takeaway from these tests is that if you are mostly compute-limited but still need to go to storage for some parts of a workflow, the SSD can make a difference in the end-to-end workflow.

On the KVM virtualization testing, we see heavier reliance upon storage. The first KVM virtualization, Workload 1, is more CPU-limited than Workload 2 or the VM Boot Storm workload, so we see strong performance, albeit not as much as the other two. These are KVM virtualization-based workloads where our client is testing how many VMs it can have online at a given time while completing work under the target SLA. Each VM is a self-contained worker. Here, the random write performance causes a lower result than we might see otherwise, but the sequential figures are good and the random read is decent so overall the drive ends up performing fairly okay here.

Moving to the file server and nginx CDN, we see much solid QoS and throughput from the Pascari SSD. The drive pulls ahead on the file server due to its faster sequential speeds. On the nginx CDN test, we are using an old snapshot and access patterns from the STH website, with caching disabled, to show what the performance looks like in that case. Here is a quick look at the distribution:

This is about what we would expect at this point in our review.

Now, for the big project: we tested these drives using every PCIe Gen5 and many Gen4 architectures as we could find, and not just x86.