Hi everyone! I struggled to find an answer here on forums, but didn't succeed, so decided to post it here.
Accidentally I bought one Toshiba PX04S off ebay for a very good price in a brand new condition. Then I bumped into a comprehensive review of this drive. What immediately caught my attention is that the drive was tested in two performance modes (9W and 12W) which differ by 30% in sequential write speeds and IOPS. In the faster mode the drive also consumes about 1W more power confirmed by measurements. Similar to CPU overclocking, right? Ok, I don't care if a single drive will consume 7W or 8W during rare moments of burst write in home environment, but +30% to performance looks very desirable. So the question is: how do I change the performance mode? Original article doesn't help at all:
Well, I'm also using one Sandisk Lightning Ascend Gen II, which according to it's datasheet doesn't have different power consumption levels, only one 'typical 5.9W'. But Sandisk scli utility shows us how deep actually the rabbit hole goes:
So we have a lot of values to choose from, with the default id=3 which is 12W. One can change it with sdparm or scli. Let's see what we have for PX04S:
Bingo, scli shows that indeed we have only two modes and which id corresponds to the higher consumption. Alter it with sdparm and that's it:
Accidentally I bought one Toshiba PX04S off ebay for a very good price in a brand new condition. Then I bumped into a comprehensive review of this drive. What immediately caught my attention is that the drive was tested in two performance modes (9W and 12W) which differ by 30% in sequential write speeds and IOPS. In the faster mode the drive also consumes about 1W more power confirmed by measurements. Similar to CPU overclocking, right? Ok, I don't care if a single drive will consume 7W or 8W during rare moments of burst write in home environment, but +30% to performance looks very desirable. So the question is: how do I change the performance mode? Original article doesn't help at all:
Then I started googling and found an article, in which Toshiba engineers confirm that by default they are dumping 30% of write performance to limit the drive power consumption. Ok, it may be relevant for multi-drive backplanes in corporate environment, but, what the hell, there is not a single user manual document from Toshiba which unveils how to switch this mode. You can notice that almost every fast SAS SSD produced after 2014 has several power modes according to the datasheets, ranging from 6W to 14W usually, which is user selectable. From Hitachi and Micron user manuals I found that there is mode page that is responsible for power consumption id, and every manufacturer has it's own default value and set of values to choose from for different power modes.
Well, I'm also using one Sandisk Lightning Ascend Gen II, which according to it's datasheet doesn't have different power consumption levels, only one 'typical 5.9W'. But Sandisk scli utility shows us how deep actually the rabbit hole goes:
Code:
C:\Program Files\SanDisk\scli\bin64>scli.exe pwrconsumptionid disk3 -l
disk3 : Power Consumption Values
=================================
Identifier Power Consumption Value
---------- -----------------------
0 9 Watts
1 10 Watts
2 11 Watts
3 12 Watts
4 13 Watts
5 14 Watts
6 15 Watts
7 16 Watts
8 17 Watts
9 18 Watts
10 19 Watts
11 20 Watts
12 21 Watts
13 22 Watts
14 23 Watts
15 24 Watts
16 25 Watts
Command Executed Successfully.
C:\Program Files\SanDisk\scli\bin64>scli.exe pwrconsumptionid disk3 -g
disk3 : Power Consumption Identifier
=====================================
Page Control Type Power Identifier
----------------- ----------------
Current 3
Changeable 255
Saved 3
Default 3
Command Executed Successfully.
Code:
C:\Program Files\SanDisk\scli\bin64>scli.exe pwrconsumptionid disk2 -l
disk2 : Power Consumption Values
=================================
Identifier Power Consumption Value
---------- -----------------------
0 9 Watts
1 12 Watts
Command Executed Successfully.
Code:
Power consumption [ps] mode page:
ACT_LEV 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0] Active level
PC_ID 1 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 1] Power consumption identifier