THE BEST SSDs FOR YOUR CASH
10 drives tested
BRANDS ARE A BIG DEAL. Lifestyle, aspiration, perceived value—all this and more is intimately associated with brands. And when it comes to SSDs, if there is one thing you want to know, it’s the brand. It’s far from all you need to know, but in our experience, SSDs in a given class tend to align by brand. As you’ll see, this month’s roundup of 10 SSDs from across the price spectrum—representing many of the best known brands, and including a wide range of technologies—largely confirms this.
Of course, there are plenty of things beyond brand that matter. In fact, there’s probably more choice and innovation in the solid-state market now than ever before. That starts with the immediate conundrum any SSD buyer must face in the choice between a standard SATA drive and something based on one of the hot new PCI Express storage interfaces.
Are you happy with the 500MB/s peak bandwidth and outdated AHCI protocol limitations that come with SATA drives? Or are you ready to make the jump to a new drive based on the lightning-fast PCI Express interface? If you like the idea of the newer technology, what about motherboard and OS compatibility? And does the new PCI Express generation actually make your PC feel faster? Or is anything beyond a decent SATA drive a case of diminishing returns?
Then there’s the cost versus capacity question, and does capacity-enhancing tech like TLC NAND and 3D NAND come at the cost of performance or longevity?
WHAT’S A BRAND WORTH TO YOU? With Hollywood celebs such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon pitching their very beings as brands, and asking the world to buy into everything from cocktail napkins to so-called curated lifestyles, you might think the whole notion of branding and brands has descended into self-parody. And we won’t argue.
However, when it comes to PC hardware, and solid-state drives in particular, brands still matter. In fact, they matter more than you might expect, given that the components inside SSDs are pretty generic. In that context, asking why SSD quality should align with branding is thoroughly legitimate.
Allow us to explain. There’s a ton of SSD brands, but few of them make the critical hardware that goes into SSDs themselves; stuff such as flash memory and controller chipsets. For the most part, SSD makers buy that stuff off the shelf, from a small set of suppliers. So, you might expect most SSDs to be pretty similar once you get past—yup, you guessed it—the branding. But they’re not, and the reason is that there’s more to it than just throwing a few parts together. That’s where brands make the difference. Just for starters, even using off-the-shelf parts, you can still cut corners or fluff things up to make the numbers look sexy.
Obvious kludges include things such as not making optimal use of the memory channels, using cheap cache memory to enable hot-looking but unsustainable peak speeds, or skimping on the overprovisioning of spare memory. Cheapskate moves like these can compromise peak performance and longevity.
The other important areas involve validation, optimization, and fine-tuning. Take some generic memory, add a third-
party controller chipset. You can even use the firmware supplied by the chipset maker to manage the whole shebang. The result would be a fully functional drive and competitive-looking numbers on paper, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a great drive.
That’s because, when it comes to more nuanced metrics—such as performance consistency over time and, indeed, overall longevity of a drive—the devil really is in the detail. It takes proper investment in engineering and development to produce a really consistent and polished SSD. In practice, that means that even some of the really big SSD brands might take a controller chipset and its firmware from a third party. But they polish it and hone it into something worthy of their brand.
In that sense, the shared third-party origins of many SSDs are irrelevant. The value is in the development and validation, which is when the $64,000 question becomes that of the identity of those “better” brands. At this point, we’ll wheel out the usual journalistic caveats. First, not every drive from the best SSD brands is a zinger. Samsung has had some wellpublicized issues with its Evo family of drives and their TLC flash memory, for instance, even if the company has usually taken pro-active measures to fix problems. Similarly, several of Intel’s early SSDs were prone to pretty catastrophic bork.
Secondly, all of this does not mean that drives from brands outside the safe list are automatically or even usually garbage. Not even close. It’s more a case of the best brands more consistently producing drives worthy of your PC. Indeed, some independent testing has shown that most SSDs are capable of surviving hundreds of terrabytes of sustained data writes beyond their claimed endurance levels. And those “better” brands, in no particular order, are Plextor, Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, and Crucial. If that’s what you might call the top tier, brands including Mushkin, Corsair, Toshiba, Kingston, OCZ, Western Digital, and others form a second tier that’s either that little bit less proven or has one or two black marks to its name.
If branding is big issue number one this month, the other major question is the choice between an old-school SATA drive and one of the newfangled drives based on the PCI Express interface—M.2 or U.2, for instance. Even the most cursory perusal of our benchmark results demonstrates that PCIe SSDs offer massively more peak performance: SATA drives top out at around 550MB/s; the fastest PCIe drives benchmarked this month rock in at over 2.5GB/s. Yup, five times faster.
Without question, there are real-world benefits to that kind of performance. If you regularly shunt large quantities of data around—maybe if you’re big on raw video editing—peak throughput like that is a huge benefit. It doesn’t hurt for things such as game level loads, either. However, when it comes to the daily grind of computing, you could argue that today’s SSDs, with their circa 500MB/s performance, are sufficient in terms of peak throughput. Instead, it’s random access that makes more difference and would most benefit from improvement in existing SATA drives.
The reason for that is twofold. Part of it comes down to the limitations of the NAND memory used in all existing SSDs. NAND memory isn’t addressable at the bit level, and that can make working with little itty bitty reads and writes hard work. The other problem is that the IDE and AHCI control protocols used by the SATA interface predate the solid-state revolution, and aren’t optimized for SSDs.
The solution to NAND’s shortcomings might be an all-new memory technology from Intel and Micron (see boxout on the right). We’ll have to wait a little while for that. However, the new NVMe protocol is here today in the latest PCI Express SSDs, and probably the single most intriguing aspect of our benchmarks this month involves random access performance. Just how much faster are those hot new NVMe-powered SSDs? Time to find out.