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Question What is the fastest SSD right now?

Super Spartan

Super Spartan

Member
I miss the days when AnandTech used to do more reviews of SSDs. What is the fastest SSD on the market right now?

SK hynix Platinum P41 vs WD Black SN850X vs WD SN810 vs Samsung 980 Pro?

I am more interested in Random 4K Read/Write than sequential numbers
 
Super Spartan said:
I am more interested in Random 4K Read/Write than sequential numbers
Click to expand...
I was going to say it depends on use.

for me though it does depend on use as internally is one aspect and in my TB4 enclosure is a totally different situation. Where internally SN850 hits the mark for speeds but the enclosure it doesn't do so well whereas a SN770 picks up the slack and outperforms higher spec options.

When it comes down to though they all tend to average out to about the same performance. 4K tends to be the slacker when measuring throughput though across all drives. I haven't really seen a drive yet that does blistering speeds on 4K tests. I know when I do bulk copies with my TB4 setup if I multithread them they go faster than just a select all and paste.

When I do an all / paste they speeds drop to 600-700MB/s but, if I grab different folders and drop them in separately I can keep consistent 3GB/s. Now, 1/2 the battle is the scheduler in Windows and the other 1/2 is the drive itself. I tested all of the drives though in Windows and Linux just to make sure there wasn't an OS hurdle to overcome limiting the speeds and performance of the drives or the enclosure or the cables I was testing with. There was some variance with the cables though testing across 5-6 of them. A couple just had more issues than others but, the majority were inline with each other.

Test them and return the ones that don't work the best.
 
Tech Junky said:
I was going to say it depends on use.

for me though it does depend on use as internally is one aspect and in my TB4 enclosure is a totally different situation. Where internally SN850 hits the mark for speeds but the enclosure it doesn't do so well whereas a SN770 picks up the slack and outperforms higher spec options.

When it comes down to though they all tend to average out to about the same performance. 4K tends to be the slacker when measuring throughput though across all drives. I haven't really seen a drive yet that does blistering speeds on 4K tests. I know when I do bulk copies with my TB4 setup if I multithread them they go faster than just a select all and paste.

When I do an all / paste they speeds drop to 600-700MB/s but, if I grab different folders and drop them in separately I can keep consistent 3GB/s. Now, 1/2 the battle is the scheduler in Windows and the other 1/2 is the drive itself. I tested all of the drives though in Windows and Linux just to make sure there wasn't an OS hurdle to overcome limiting the speeds and performance of the drives or the enclosure or the cables I was testing with. There was some variance with the cables though testing across 5-6 of them. A couple just had more issues than others but, the majority were inline with each other.

Test them and return the ones that don't work the best.
Click to expand...
Right, so from what you're saying, there is no point in me shelling out money on any other SSD than what I have right now which is the WD SN810

WD SN810 1TB SSD (AHCI).png
 
Unless you want to go through different drives and testing them. Reviews are one thing but, real world use is another completely. Testing a baren drive and one that's 50-75% full is a different story as well. Moving actual files vs synthetic tests is going to behave differently as well.

#'s are only part of the game. Some drives bench exceptionally but fail miserably when you put data on them.

1664303413467.png

so, here I tested 2 different SN770 drives w/ and w/o data on the drive and they're on par with your 4K writes in a Gen3 slot. If I moved the SN770 over to a Gen4 sot they might blow away the readings comparatively with more bandwidth available. I just didn't feel like doing it as my focus was comparing the speed between the internal slot and the TB4 enclosure. They're both a tight grouping for speeds which satified my need for testing the drive + enclosure to make sure it's as quick as it can be.

I also tested Phison based drives and others in the enclosure and they had 30-50% deficits in speeds whether from the controller / dram / chips.

I went through a similar testing with internal drives on my server with another Phison based drive before swapping it out with the SN850 but, the other issue was the testing program on the server couldn't keep up with either drive so I ended up using a different method for testing and got more realistic top end numbers that weren't bottlenecked.

When it comes to the price spread on 1TB drives low being the SN770 @ $80 and the higher end drives closer to $200 it comes down to use, If the SN770 was an option back when I built either system I would have tried it and compared things and probably saved ~$100 or more on drives.
 
PCIe 5 drives come out next month. They will be the fastest by far, if your motherboard supports PCIe 5 drives that is.
 
Muadib said:
PCIe 5 drives come out next month. They will be the fastest by far, if your motherboard supports PCIe 5 drives that is.
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Only one I know of is the ASRock velocita but the RPL boards should have more than a single slot for gen5 M2. The problem is having enough lanes to support them.
 
Tech Junky said:
Only one I know of is the ASRock velocita but the RPL boards should have more than a single slot for gen5 M2. The problem is having enough lanes to support them.
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I've been looking at AMD boards. Gigabyte X670E motherboards supports Gen5 M.2 . I'm sure there will be others.
 
Muadib said:
Is that not the case with Intel?
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Not with ADL, maybe with RPL but, there's a lack of specs for the 790 series still. AMD forced the issue a bit with the whole DDR5 or nothing front on the am5 boards which hints at gen5 M2 slots. Besides the fact that those slots have had a year now to get situated with drive releases coming very soon. Part of the issue with Intel is how they tie the pcie lanes to the CPU and chipset.
 
Yes I spent a few hours researching the pcie lanes for Raptor Lake and I believe if you use a PCI 4 GPU and a PCI 5 SSD you only get PCI 4 x 8 lanes for the GPU. If you had a PCI 5 GPU you would still get 8 lanes, but double the bandwidth.
 
I wonder why the performance on my 980 pro is cratering so bad:
CrystalDiskMark_20221011020552.png

edit:
oh, I see, there is a nvme setting in the benchmark itself:
CrystalDiskMark_20221011021304.png

I wonder if drive encryption effects this at all?


Anyway, for entertainments sake, mismatched SATAx3:
CrystalDiskMark_20221011022451.png
 
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