This is a capsule review of the fanxiang S880 2TB NVMe SSD. It’s available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. I’m taking a look at the 2TB model.
Design
The SSD boasts a sleek and minimalist appearance. It’s a single-sided drive.
While the device is well priced, it looks reasonably well manufactured which helps to give some confidence. But never judge a book by its cover.
My drive has a cooling sticker applied but it’s also available with a heatsink. The cooling sticker model retails for around £90 although I’ve seen it cheaper.
The installation process is straightforward as you’d expect. Included in the package, Fanxiang provides a M.2 mounting screw and a screwdriver. The NVMe uses the M.2 2280 form factor, and is best paired with a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, although it will, of course, work with a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot but the motherboard will be a limiting factor.
KDiskMark
Benchmarks such as the open source KDiskMark utility help provide an insight into the performance of the direct-attached storage device. The results translate to the instantaneous performance numbers that consumers can expect for specific workloads, but make no reference to changes in behaviour when the unit is subject to long-term conditioning and/or thermal throttling.
KDiskMark uses four different access traces for reads and writes over a configurable region size. Two of the traces are sequential accesses, while two are 4K random accesses.
Here are the results of KDiskMark. I am running the operating system (Manjaro with kernel 6.16.0) on a different NVMe to make sure the operating system doesn’t interfere with the benchmarks.
According to the manufacturer the NVMe has read speeds up to 7,300 MB/s and write speeds up to 6,600 MB/s. As you can see, the drive doesn’t reach those speeds in this particular machine although I have got better results when previously testing a different S880. And the results of the other benchmarks are at variance too, with say RND4K Q32T1 reads being exceptionally good, yet RND4K Q1T1 reads are poor.
I also tested with post cache write speed of the drive which is around 870 MB/s, a relatively low figure but it’s a DRAM-less drive.
Summary
The fanxiang S880 2TB is good value. It’s an inexpensive drive but offers unremarkable performance compared to its peers.
fanxiang are not highly respected when it comes to quality control and may rebrand lower quality chips from other manufacturers. I also cannot rule out this specific drive has issues. I will investigate more and update this review accordingly.