Group test: Ultrafast workstation storage
NVME solid-state storage enables transfer speeds that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, improving workstation performance across the board
We test six NVME SSDS
Solid-state drives (SSDS) are now an essential aspect of all computers, from cheap laptops right up to the high-end workstations needed for 3D design. They’ve also been around for some time now, with the first affordable desktop SSDS going on sale well over a decade ago.
SSD performance beats hard disks in both file transfer speeds and seek time, which is why you can expect your operating system to load in seconds rather than minutes, and most applications are ready to use within moments of clicking their icon. Unlike a hard disk, there’s no delay while the computer waits for a mechanical arm to move into place and there’s no performance penalty whenever data is fragmented in parts all over the disk.
Any limit on SSD performance is (generally) not down to the medium of flash memory but rather the drive’s interface with the rest of the computer. 2.5-inch drives are still the most common kind of SSD, they plug into a SATA port just like a hard disk and are therefore limited to the speed of that bus, which tops out at around 550 Mb/sec. This limitation has been overcome by completely replacing the SATA standard with a new design for SSDS that uses the much faster PCIE bus. The ‘gumstick’ M.2 form factor replaces the old 2.5-inch drive design with a far smaller storage card that plugs directly into a computer motherboard, most commonly measuring 80mm in length.
Transfer speeds of PCIE SSDS are many times faster than SATA. How much faster depends on how many lanes the SSD can use, and whether your computer motherboard supports PCIE 3.0 or the newer PCIE 4.0 standard.
PCIE 3.0 delivers 1GB/S of bandwidth per lane. PCIE 4.0 delivers 2GB/S per lane. Most SSDS use four PCIE lanes, so (theoretically) the bandwidth limit of PCIE 3.0 SSDS is 4GB/S while PCIE 4.0 SSDS can go up to 8GB/S.
Currently, only the most recent 500-series AMD motherboards can support PCIE 4.0, while Intel has promised support in a future processor generation.
Because of the higher performance of PCIE SSDS, it currently makes sense to use them for a PC operating system and applications, with higher-capacity secondary storage used for work files and media. You might even opt for a secondary, high-capacity SATA SSD for use with large files, such as textures, media, and so on.
But one tip worth considering is that an NVME M.2 SSD also makes a superb external storage device, with the right enclosure. With
Thunderbolt or USB 3.1 Gen 2, you can finally see external storage performance eclipse SATA SSDS.
We will be comparing six NVME SSDS in this month’s group test, with a mix of drives that support PCIE 3.0 and PCIE 4.0. We’ll be testing and reviewing each drive in an AMD motherboard with three popular benchmarking tools: ATTO, AS SSD and Crystaldiskmark. Each of these benchmarking tools gives various raw performance results, including burst speeds, compressed data transfers and the typical copy times of different file types.
At the end, we’ll carefully consider whether PCIE 4.0 is worth investing in over PCIE 3.0, evaluate which drives are best value for money, and help you decide which drive is worth buying now.
“AN NVME M.2 SSD ALSO MAKES A SUPERB EXTERNAL STORAGE DEVICE. WITH THUNDERBOLT OR USB 3.1 GEN 2, YOU CAN FINALLY SEE EXTERNAL STORAGE PERFORMANCE ECLIPSE SATA SSDS”
PRICE £153 (1TB) WEBSITE www.xpg.com
It’s harder to make a big splash when you’re a smaller brand like ADATA competing with established household names. And there’s no shortage of SSDS on the market, which is why ADATA has opted for great performance at reasonable pricing and value with its SX8200 Pro NVME SSD.
Based on 64-layer 3D TLC NAND sourced from Micron, the SX8200 Pro is a PCIE
3.0 SSD that is available in capacities from 256GB to 2TB. The specifications aren’t bad at all, slightly edging ahead of competitors in quoted 640TBW longevity for the 1TB model, 3,500 MB/S and 3,000 MB/S read and write burst transfer speeds and 390K/380K IOPS.
The package contains a bundled red and black optional heat spreader, branded with XPG’S logo, with Toolbox maintenance software that matches Samsung’s Magician in functionality, including Secure Erase, firmware updating and optimisation features. Not so comparable with the software interface though, which is laughably basic.
Pricing is reasonable. We found the 1TB SX8200 Pro available for £153, which slightly undercuts all the drives on test and makes it a great way to jump into PCIE storage if you need to stick to a budget, although the savings aren’t especially significant over any of the other PCIE 3.0 SSDS here on test.
Performance also matches the claimed speeds. We measured 3,497 MB/S read and 3,094 MB/S write speeds in Crystaldiskmark, although this dropped slightly lower in ATTO, and it had the lowest recorded score in AS SSD, although only by a few points, which is fairly negligible.
The file copy tests demonstrated that paying slightly less for the SX8200 Pro won’t result in worse system performance – the results were identical to the other drives except in the ‘program’ benchmark, which came out a mere 0.07 seconds slower.
We were highly impressed by this drive. With decent performance, a warranty period and longevity that matches other NVME SSDS, along with a functional software toolkit, the SX8200 Pro is a great buy.
VERDICT
The MP600 is one of only two PCIE 4.0 drives on test here. Corsair is a behemoth in the world of computer peripherals and memory, but has a relatively modest range of SSDS and fairly small market share compared with some of its competitors. Eager to make a big impact, it has been quick to embrace the PCIE 4.0 standard.
And it just might do so with the MP600. It’s no coincidence that Scan Computers chose to use the MP600 as the system drive in its £8,000 32-core AMD Threadripper workstation we reviewed in Issue 259. It’s the best performing SSD in this roundup and delivers some very fast transfer speeds thanks to the extra headroom with PCIE 4.0.
The drive’s physical appearance is notable for its whopping heat spreader. PCIE SSDS can get very toasty, as there’s a lot of electronics that have been squeezed into a small space. Corsair has taken no chances, but the heat spreader is so tall on the MP600 there’s a small chance it could get in the way of other components, depending on your motherboard. You may need to remove it.
The controller is by Phison, who also sell PCIE 4.0 SSDS under their own brand, with 3D TLC memory chips from SK Hynix. Capacities start at 500GB and prices are notably much higher than PCIE 3.0 SSDS. You’ll likely pay around the same amount for the 500GB Corsair MP600 as you may for a 1TB capacity PCIE 3.0 SSD.
Notably, the MP600 has a few more beefy specifications though besides raw performance that stand out from PCIE 3.0 SSDS. IOPS are quoted at up to 600K/680K, while longevity is significantly higher, up to 3,600TBW.
Benchmark results demonstrate the MP600 living up to Corsair’s claims, with fantastic burst read and write performance of 4,977 Mb/sec and 4,445 Mb/sec respectively, the best performance from all the SSDS in this group test. Similarly, the MP600 came out on top in the AS SSD and ATTO benchmarks.
It’s considerably more expensive than any of the other drives though, and to actually benefit from PCIE 4.0 you currently need a recent AMD system. Intel workstations all currently use PCIE 3.0, so if you plug it into an Intel workstation you won’t get the faster speeds.
Additionally, the file copy tests showed less of an advantage for the MP600 than raw transfer benchmarks, on average a much closer result to the PCIE 3.0 SSDS. Our recommendation is that while the MP600 is brilliant, PCIE 4.0 is a nicety, rather than an essential reason to upgrade your workstation.
VERDICT
As with Kingston, Samsung is a major name in global flash storage products, and similarly doesn’t have a PCIE 4.0 drive out yet.
But Samsung can rest in the knowledge that it has considerable market share. For some time, Samsung SSDS have been some of the most popular on the market, consistently known for great performance, although generally not for being the most affordable drives.
Until a PCIE 4.0 drive arrives, the 970 EVO Plus is the top-end SSD that Samsung has to offer. It’s based on the usual 3-bit TLC 96-layer flash memory, which along with the controller, is all made in-house by Samsung, giving the company a secret sauce that somewhat explains how it comes up trumps in tests.
Quoted performance is at the top end of PCIE 3.0’s headroom, with an impressive 3,500 Mb/sec read and 3,300 Mb/sec write speeds – some of the highest of all the PCIE 3.0 SSDS on the market, and 600K/550K IOPS.
Samsung backs up its SSDS with the superb Magician software that enables quick access to Ssd-specific functions such as firmware updates, secure erasing, security and optimisation.
This is no small thing, since without such good software, the (sometimes necessary) task of maintaining an SSD may require significant time messing around with scripts and executables in the command prompt.
The benchmark results match Samsung’s quoted claims, with 3,486 Mb/sec read and 3,299 Mb/sec write speeds in Crystaldiskmark. The 970 EVO Plus came top in ATTO tests, had the best Q32 result in Crystaldiskmark and showed the best write score in AS SSD. It didn’t quite take the top spot for read performance though.
The pricing is fairly reasonable too. In all, the whole package of constantly great performance with the Magician software just tips us towards the 970 EVO Plus as our favourite PCIE 3.0 drive.
VERDICT
“QUOTED PERFORMANCE IS AT THE TOP END OF PCIE 3.0’S HEADROOM”
PRICE £256 (1TB) WEBSITE www.seagate.com
PCIE 4.0 is still relatively new, and as we’ve mentioned already, only the newest AMD systems can take advantage of it right now. Some firms are holding out for wider chipset support before throwing their hats into the ring, which is why the Seagate Firecuda 520 and Corsair MP600 are the only two PCIE 4.0 drives we’re testing here.
The Firecuda 520 is based on the Phison controller, with 96-layer Toshiba TLC flash (TLC means three bits per cell, which has become the standard SSD bit density). It’s clearly well specced and in a good position to give Corsair’s MP600 a run for its money. Notably both the MP600 and the 520 are significantly more expensive than all PCIE 3.0 SSDS.
However, despite their best efforts, the friendly chaps at Seagate were unable to source the 1TB version of the Firecuda 520 in time for this group test, and instead we received a 500GB model.
As well as guaranteeing better longevity, SSD technology sometimes performs better with larger capacities and the Firecuda 520 is an example of this. The 1TB version has quoted read performance of 5,000 Mb/sec and excellent 4,400 Mb/sec write performance, while the 500GB version drops the write performance down to 2,500 Mb/sec.
Similarly the impressive 700K IOPS on the 1TB model drops to 630K on the 500GB model, which really negates the whole point of having a PCIE 4.0 SSD.
It also makes it harder to compare the results we got with the rest of the drives. The Firecuda 520 is a fast SSD at both reading and writing, but our results don’t exactly show it. We measured 4,976 Mb/sec read and 2,529 Mb/sec write.
But having said all this, one file transfer copy time still came out on top, beating Corsair’s MP600. The AS benchmark score was a close second and still beat all the PCIE 3.0 drives, so despite the lower capacity, the Firecuda 520 put in some great results.
But go with at least 1TB capacity. Once Windows is on it, a swap file, applications, loads of junk from temporary program caches and perhaps a few plugins, 500GB can disappear quickly. If you’re forking out for a new Amdbased PCIE 4.0 workstation, opting for a mere 500GB SSD is doing it a disservice.
Early PCIE SSDS debuted in a very different format to today’s tiny M.2 devices. They were originally full-size cards that slotted into your computer’s motherboard in the same way as a graphics card, in order to beat the performance limitations of the SATA bus.
In retrospect, full-sized PCIE SSDS never worked that well. Not only were they excessively large (and very expensive) but some motherboards had trouble booting from them.
It’s these failings that led to a rethink of computer storage, and the creation of a new industry-standard SSD form factor and data connector that would become M.2 PCIE drives. Plus, the NVME protocol was introduced to reduce I/O latency and improve SSD performance.
With the serious speed you get with NVME SSDS, it’s hard not to recommend them over SATA drives. It makes sense to keep your OS and application installs on an NVME SSD, and aim for the largest capacity you can afford. We’d recommend no less than 1TB and more if you can afford it in any workstation now, as that space fills up quickly over time.
But slightly depressingly, the impressive improvements in burst read and write speeds over SATA SSDS will not translate to equal improvements in PC responsiveness or load times. Just because tests show an NVME SSD is six times faster than a SATA drive, your PC won’t boot six times quicker.
So because of this, you should somewhat temper your expectations. The ultrafast speeds of PCIE 4.0 really stand out with Corsair’s MP600 SSD, making it our top choice for a high-end workstation, but its fantastic performance comes at a high price and it won’t be especially life changing in daily use over PCIE 3.0 drives.
Of the PCIE 3.0 drives, we are leaning towards the Samsung 970 EVO Plus as our top recommendation. It delivers great transfer speeds, and the high-quality Magician software is really the icing on the cake.
At the more affordable end of the scale though, both the XPG SX8200 Pro and Kingston KC2000 still demonstrate far superior transfer speeds than SATA drives.
The real-world performance of all the NVME drives on test only differs by a knife edge. Go with NVME for your system drive, and perhaps use SATA drives (maybe two in RAID 0) as fast backup for file asset libraries, video, and so on.
Lastly, you might be interested in one more application of NVME drives with the M.2 form factor. You can now buy small M.2 external enclosures that support either Thunderbolt or the newest 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 connectors.
These are sold by numerous manufacturers (including Asus, Akasa and Startech) and are designed to allow you to use a PCIE drive as external storage. As long as your PC motherboard has the required connector, with a fast NVME drive in one of these you should see transfer speeds well in excess of any USB hard disk or standard SSD, and it won’t cost the earth either. •
Tiny M.2 drives slot directly into a motherboard