The fastest SSDs hit the limit of the PCIe 4.0 interface already three years ago, but the trend of the last year is the acceleration of the middle class. And, of course, the brutal price drop, which pushes the price for 1 GB to the magical limit of CZK 1. We tested nine M.2 NVMe SSDs with a capacity of 2 TB.
Large SSD tests have appeared regularly in Computer and on Živa since 2010, so we can open the topic through a historical window. In 13 years, the sequential read speed has increased from about 200 MB/s to more than 7,000 MB/s, or at least 35x. At that time, the normal capacity was 128 GB, today, thanks to the drop in prices, 2 TB can be considered the standard, roughly 15 times more.
He looks good at this chart. Evolution of the price per 1 GB over the years.
And the most interesting thing: the average price for 1 GB of capacity fell roughly 40x from CZK 83 to CZK 1.90. These are amazing numbers that say the same thing: we live in a time where storage is extremely fast, yet incredibly affordable.
We also talked about SSD in Live Week:
Forget PCIe 3.0
Just a year ago, we invited SSDs with PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 interfaces to a big test. It made sense, the three offered lower speeds, but at a significantly lower price. “Four” meant exclusivity, for which you had to pay at least 50% more, and even more for the best models.
Today, PCIe 3.0 is almost disappearing from the market and their prices are not so much lower that they are worth considering. And even for owners of older boards, who may not yet fully utilize the potential of the new SSD. Do you want proof? While the cheapest PCIe 3.0 SSD with a capacity of 2 TB costs CZK 2,100, for PCIe 4.0 it costs CZK 1,900, and you can get a very good Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite for only CZK 2,390. It’s time to thank SSDs with PCIe 3.0 for their merits, but at the same time forget about them.
The obvious consequence is the reduction in the number of SSDs in the test, but the important thing is that we covered the entire price and performance offer. From the cheapest and theoretically slowest to the most equipped models. We increased the tested capacity to 2 TB, because an SSD with a capacity of 1 TB becomes a piece of jewelry, the purchase of which no one will bother to buy due to the price.
Alphabetical list of tested models:
Crucial P3 Plus
Goodram PX600
Kingston SSD Fury Renegade Heatsink
MSI Spatium M480 HS
Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite
Samsung 990 Pro Heatsink
Solidigm P44 Pro
Transcend MTE250H
WD Black SN850X
Speeding up the slow ones
In addition to the significant drop in prices, the trend of the last year has become the acceleration of the slower and cheaper SSD models. While a year ago, a cheaper PCIe 4.0 SSD offered sequential read speeds of around 4 GB/s and write speeds of around 2.5 GB/s, this year it is far beyond the 5 GB/s and 4 GB/s write speeds, respectively.
In addition, the attentive reader will notice that these differences really only lie in the sequential read and write speeds. For example, compare the SSD from the first three places with the Patriot Viper VP4300 at half the price: in the important tests of working with small files, it is even faster in some tests. In practice, the differences are completely negligible and barely noticeable.
The drop in prices is truly impressive: year-on-year prices of some SSDs have halved while maintaining or even increasing performance
So what is the significant price difference? Lower SSD models tend to be so-called DRAMless, i.e. they do not have their own chip with operating memory (for 2TB capacities usually 2 GB), which of course helps to reduce production costs. SSD relies on a technique called HMB (Host Memory Buffer) – they use part of the computer’s operating memory as a buffer. This entails certain risks (especially in the event of a power outage), but other protection mechanisms solve this. And as can be seen from the tests, the impact on performance is surprisingly low, completely negligible in practice.
DRAMless SSDs were generally not recommended for use in the PlayStation 5, as its system cannot use HMB, however, practical tests again prove that the differences are only cosmetic, when loading games in the order of seconds. And this is great news for gamers who want to expand their console’s memory by a great 2 TB very cheaply.
Solidigm offers a nice modern application, but it lacks, for example, data cloning. Also, the temperature reported is rather the system temperature, it is definitely not the SSD temperature
Controllers and memories: surprises with QLC
It already looked like the dominating Samsung would take the victory in many of our comparative tests, but the lead was blown by an unexpected shooter: Solidigm uses the SK Hynix Aries controller, a quad-core, eight-channel ARM processor with unprecedented performance. However, Samsung with the new three-core Pascal controller is very close behind, and we would not be surprised if users prefer the well-known name and proven quality of the Korean manufacturer. Last year, the Phison E18-PS5518 controllers reigned supreme, which are also represented in our test by their siblings – Kingston and MSI.
A slight stagnation was manifested in the world of NAND memory chips. Until now, the increase in the number of layers has been rather constant year-on-year, now manufacturers are slowing down. The current top is 176-layer NAND, produced by SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron, although models with more than 200 layers were discussed by all manufacturers already in the middle of last year. That is why the SSD Patriot with memories from the Chinese manufacturer YMTC with 232 layers looks interesting.
The performance differences are significantly blurred and it is basically impossible to buy a bad SSD today. Even so, we found a few surprises
Perhaps a little surprisingly, with the increase in layers, the stated lifetime of the SSD gradually increases. Long-time readers of Computer may remember that before the advent of 3D NAND technology, there was a classic planar technology, where the manufacturing process was gradually reduced, which, however, shortened the life of SSDs hand in hand. So here it is the opposite. However, it is still true that the actual lifetime of the SSD indicated by the volume of data written (TBW – Total Bytes Written) is far beyond the stated value. After all – SSDs have been with us for many years, and seriously, how many SSDs have you met in that time that would die of memory chip wear?
QLC are accelerating
Another surprise of the test was a pair of SSDs using QLC memory. None of the manufacturers – Crucial and Goodram – boast of used memory, and this, together with the shorter stated lifetime and low price, usually signals the use of these “unattractive” memories. They were surprising in a positive sense, since the performance of both SSDs would have been at the very top just two years ago.
Of course, there are fluctuations here, but especially thanks to the effective use of the SLC cache, the memory is well masked. It is an SSD that will completely satisfy ordinary users or owners of laptops. However, the main problem both SSDs have in common: they should be cheaper, but they are not. The competition is close and many interested parties will pay a few hundred extra for an SSD with TLC memories. In short, the reader of Computer puts it on the computer of his parents or in the office and knows that it will survive, but he does not buy it himself.
This article is part of the PREMIUM+ package
Unlock exclusive content and ad-free videos on nine sites.
Try it for CZK 1 Or separate Live Premium
2023-09-11 10:45:20
#crown #speeds #extreme #Comparative #test #SSD #capacity
