The Enmotus FuzeDrive P200 SSD takes an unconventional approach to increase SSD performance and extend lifespan by leveraging the power of AI to deliver up to 3.4 GBps and class-leading endurance. According to the company, artificial intelligence isn’t just about robots and decrypting future business trends — it can also enhance your SSD and tune it to your usage patterns, thus unlocking more performance and endurance.
Enmotus builds the FuzeDrive P200 using commodity hardware but says the drive delivers more than six times more endurance than most QLC-based SSDs through its sophisticated AI-boosted software and tiering techniques. In fact, a single 1.6 TB drive is guaranteed to absorb an amazing 3.6 petabytes of write data throughout its warranty. The company’s FusionX software also allows you to expand your storage volume up to 32TB by adding another SSD or HDD (just one). All of this will set you back the same cost of a new Samsung 980 Pro with a faster PCIe interface, though, ultimately making this drive attractive only for a niche audience.
Innovative AI Storage
Traditional SSDs, like Sabrent’s Rocket Q, come with QLC flash that operates in a dynamic SLC mode. While this provides fast performance and high capacity, it has drawbacks that primarily manifest as low endurance.
However, QLC flash can operate in the full 16-level, low-endurance QLC mode or operate in a high-endurance SLC mode, which is advantageous for Enmotus’s FuzeDrive P200 SSD. By operating Micron’s flash solely in high endurance SLC mode, the flash’s endurance multiplies - its program-erase cycle rating increases from roughly 600-1,000 cycles to 30,000 cycles. The main reason being that in SLC mode, the flash can be programmed in just one pass, whereas QLC takes 3+ cycles to fine-tune the cell charge.
The 1.6TB FuzeDrive P200 comes with 2TB of raw flash, but not all of it is available to the user. This is somewhat similar to Intel’s Optane Memory H10 and soon-to-be-released H20, but instead of the complication of relying on two separate controllers and storage mediums, the P200 uses only one controller and one type of flash. The FuzeDrive leverages the advantages that both dynamic and high endurance SLC modes have to offer by splitting the device into two LBA zones. The first LBA range is the high endurance zone, and it sacrifices 512GB of the raw flash to provide 128GB of SLC goodness (4 bits QLC -> 1-bit SLC), but the user can’t access this area directly. The remaining QLC flash in the second LBA zone operates in dynamic SLC mode and is made available to the end user. The 900GB model comes with a smaller 24GB SLC cache.
The company’s intelligent AI NVMe driver virtualizes the zones into a single volume and relocates data to either portion after analyzing the I/O. In this tiering configuration, a large RAM-based table is set up in memory (roughly 100MB) to track I/O behavior across the whole storage device. Most active and write-intensive data is automatically directed to the SLC zone, and inactive data is moved to the QLC portion with minimal CPU overhead compared to caching techniques. Movements are done only in the background, and only one copy of the data exists. The NVMe driver manages the data placement, while the drive uses a special modified firmware to split it into two separate LBA zones.
Specifications
| Product | FuzeDrive P200 900GB | FuzeDrive P200 1.6TB |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $199.99 | $349.99 |
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 |
| Interface / Protocol | PCIe 3.0 x4 / NVMe 1.3 | PCIe 3.0 x4 / NVMe 1.3 |
| Controller | Phison PS5012-E12S | Phison PS5012-E12S |
| DRAM | DDR3L | DDR3L |
| Memory | Micron 96L QLC | Micron 96L QLC |
| Sequential Read | 3,470 MBps | 3,470 MBps |
| Sequential Write | 2,000 MBps | 3,000 MBps |
| Random Read | 193,000 IOPS | 372,000 IOPS |
| Random Write | 394,000 IOPS | 402,000 IOPS |
| Endurance (TBW) | 750 TB | 3,600 TB |
| Part Number | P200-900/24 | P200-1600/128 |
| Warranty | 5-Years | 5-Years |
Enmotus’s FuzeDrive P200 comes in 900GB and 1.6TB capacities. Both fetch a pretty penny, priced at $200 and $350, respectively, roughly matching the price of the fastest Gen4 SSDs on the market. The FuzeDrive P200 comes with a Gen3 NVMe SSD controller, so Enmotus rated it for up to 3,470 / 3,000 MBps of sequential read/write throughput and sustain up to 372,000 / 402,000 random read/write IOPS.
But, while Samsung’s 980 Pro may be faster, it only offers one-third the endurance of the P200. Enmotus rates the 900GB model to handle up to 750 TB of writes during its five-year warranty. The 1.6TB model is much more robust — It can handle up to 3.6 petabytes of writes within its warranty, meaning the P200 comes backed with the highest endurance rating we’ve seen for a QLC SSD of this capacity.
Software and Accessories
Enmotus provides Fuzion, a utility that monitors the SSD and enables other maintenance tasks, like updating firmware or secure erasing the SSD. The software is available from the Microsoft Store and will automatically install and update the driver for the device. The company also provides the Enmotus-branded Macrium Reflect Cloning Software to help migrate data to the new SSD, as well as the FuzionX software for more complex tiering capability.
When adding a third device into the mix, such as a high-capacity SATA SSD or HDD (NVMe support under development), you can use FusionX software to integrate it into the P200’s virtual volume. The SLC portion of the P200 SSD will retain the volume’s hot data, the QLC portion will retain the warm data, while the HDD stores cold data.
A Closer Look
Enmotus’s FuzeDrive P200 SSD comes in an M.2 2280 form factor, and the 2TB model is double-sided solely to place a second DRAM IC on the back of the PCB. The company uses a copper heat spreader label to aid with heat dissipation. The controller supports ASPM, ASPT, and the L1.2 sleep mode to reduce power when the drive isn’t busy.
As mentioned, Enomotus builds the FuzeDrive P200 with commodity hardware - Phison’s mainstream E12S PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3-compliant SSD controller and Micron QLC flash, but the firmware is specifically designed to enable splitting the drive into two distinct zones - one high endurance, one low endurance. The controller has dual Arm Cortex R5 CPUs, clocked at 666MHz, and a DRAM cache. The controller interfaces with two Nanya 4Gb DDR3L DRAM ICs at 1600 MHz for fast access to the FTL mapping tables.
There are four NAND packages on our 2TB sample, each containing four 1Tb Micron 96-Layer QLC packages. For responsive random performance and solid performance in mixed workloads, the flash has a four-plane architecture and interfaces with this eight-channel controller at speeds up to 667 MTps. To ensure reliable operation and maintain data integrity over time, the controller implements Phion’s third-generation LDPC ECC and RAID ECC along with a DDR ECC engine and end-to-end data path protection.
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Comparison Products
We’re comparing the FuzeDrive P200 to some of the best SSDs available. For PCIe 4.0 competitors, we include the top-notch WD Black SN850 and the more affordable Silicon Power US70. We also threw in a Samsung 970 EVO Plus, Crucial P5, and Intel SSD 670p. Additionally, we have a few SSDs with the same hardware as the P200, but with full dynamic SLC caching instead — the Sabrent Rocket Q and Silicon Power’s UD70, two much more affordable contenders.
Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.
The FuzeDrive P200 delivers responsive game loads and rivals some of the faster SSDs on the market. It even outpaced the Rocket Q and UD70 this round, showing that the static SLC layer does its job well in this type of application.
Transfer Rates – DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom dataset. We copy a 50GB dataset, including 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos, to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.
The FuzeDrive P200 is speedy during file transfer operations, outperforming the cheaper SSDs in the group, but it couldn’t quite keep up with Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus or the PCIe Gen4 competitors.
Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test
PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs for leisure or basic office work, while the full benchmark relates more to power users.
PCMark 10’s Quick System Drive Benchmark shows that the P200 delivers roughly the same user experience as the other E12S and QLC-based SSDs in the group, but the drive proved to be exceptionally impressive when we hit it with the heavier Full System Drive Benchmark. Not only did it outpace the Rocket Q and UD70, but it also outperformed the P5 and 970 EVO Plus. Intel’s SSD 670p and the PCIe Gen4 SSDs are still more responsive, though, due to aggressive tuning for this type of workload.
Synthetic Testing - ATTO / iometer
iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool, while ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.
At a queue depth (QD) of one, which helps quantify the snappiness of the drive in everyday tasks, the FuzeDrive P200 lags slightly in sequential read performance with smaller chunks of data but ramps up to full speed from the 4MB block size. Performance increases once we ramp up to higher queue depths, with the P200 peaking at 3,478 / 2,981 MBps of sequential read/write throughput.
The P200’s random read and write performance is solid for a PCIe 3.0 SSD, rivaling many of the faster SSDs in the market. Peak random performance exceeds the company’s official ratings at a QD of 128, too. The P200 pushes out 378,000 / 476,000 random read/write IOPS when we hammer it with a ridiculously heavy workload, beating the Intel SSD 670p.
Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.
The FuzeDrive P200 uses some of its flash in static SLC mode while most of its flash runs in full dynamic SLC mode, so we expected it to come with a much smaller SLC cache than the UD70 and Rocket Q.
However, the P200’s cache absorbed 510GB of data at 3 GBps before performance degraded. After the cache filled, the average write speed fell to just 200 MBps. This makes for solid performance in most consumer applications but may not be up to muster for most power users and enthusiasts, even though the drive does rebound quickly. After just a minute of idle time, the SSD recovered 160GB of its dynamic SLC cache.
Power Consumption and Temperature
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle, while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.
We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.
Enmotus’s FuzeDrive P200 is an efficient SSD that seems to run more efficiently due to its multiple namespaces. It sipped the least amount of power under load, and its peak power consumption was also lower than competing drives. While the vanilla Rocket Q and UD70 SSDs scored roughly 240 MBps-per-watt, the P200 led with 259 MBps-per-watt.
The drive also remained cool during testing. On our test bench with no airflow at 23 degrees Celsius, the P200’s temperatures were well within expectations. At idle, it hovered in the high 30 degree Celsius range. When taxed with a few hundred GB of drag n’ drop file transfer operations, the P200 peaked at 74-76 degrees Celsius temperatures and we didn’t detect any thermal throttling.
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Enmotus’s FuzeDrive P200 is an innovative storage device that delivers solid performance and has great potential for home lab and virtualized applications. The benefits of the P200’s SLC implementation extend beyond ‘just’ having extremely high endurance.
Most of the workloads flow directly through the SLC portion of the flash, allowing the FuzeDrive P200 to deliver faster-than-average performance in many of our benchmarks — even when compared to traditional SSDs with full dynamic SLC caching. This technique even helps increase power efficiency under load. As a result, the P200 is among the most efficient PCIe 3.0 SSDs we’ve tested.
The FuzeDrive P200 does suffer from slow sustained write performance; you just can't get around that with QLC flash. The drive slowed to a mere 200 MBps during our extended write testing, while drives like the 980 Pro can write at 1.7 GBps for long periods of time. As a result, while the P200 delivers up to an astounding 3.6 PB of endurance, you’ll have to be patient during extended-duration file transfers, which might not be the best fit for the professional crowd. The P200 does recover quickly, though, so it bounces back well after extended sessions of heavy abuse.
One could argue that you could heavily overprovision a QLC SSD and get similar results. For instance, you could configure a 2TB SSD to just 1.6TB in an attempt to reach similar endurance levels as the P200, but based on some quick napkin math, that's not quite possible. The gains from heavy overprovisioning simply aren’t enough to outweigh the extreme levels of higher endurance provided by the SLC zone in conjunction with the AI NVMe driver.
Enomotus’s overall goal with the FuzeDrive P200 SSD is to provide a balance of performance, endurance, and capacity at a significantly lower price point than a single high-capacity SSD. While we think the company could be on track for greatness, they don’t quite have a winner yet at current prices.
The software capability is part of the cost of this purchase, and for those looking for this type of solution, it can be an awesome product. However, Enmotus is banking more on the value of its software than the hardware behind it, so the FuzeDrive P200 isn’t for everyone. That’s especially true for gamers, who often splurge on a new GPU but only save pennies for storage and don’t often write hundreds of terabytes of data to their storage device in a year.
Enmotus is a solid proof of concept and a stepping stone for something better in the future. The high cost of the device offsets its mainstream appeal, though. If you’re looking at the P200 for the hardware alone, it is overpriced, especially compared to the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market (which the FuzeDrive P200 is not). The benefits of Enmotus’s SSD technology should scale well as larger SSDs hit the market, though, and pairing the tiering technique with faster SSD controllers and flash could make for more competitive drives in the future.
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