THE FINAL RECKONING
SIX SPEEDY M.2 SSDS. A zillion benchmarks. And a whole hill of specs. But what have we learned? Firstly, the quality of current SSDs is very high. There absolutely isn’t a dud here. Every single drive would be an electrifying upgrade for a system based on something like an old SATA SSD. Indeed, it’s remarkable to think 7GB-plus per second of bandwidth is rapidly becoming the norm. You don’t have to be as old as Ulysses S. Grant to remember when that kind of bandwidth was decent for a CPU, let alone storage.
If there is a disappointment it involves 4K random access performance. It’s those tiny little data requests and writes that can make the difference to how snappy your PC feels in regular use. While random access throughput has improved thanks to a big uptick in IOPS or Input Output Operations performance, 4K performance is still miles off sequential throughput and not progressing at the same pace. To put that into numbers, these PCIe 4.0 drives are well over ten times faster for sequential performance than a good SATA SSD, but more like three to four times quicker for 4K throughput.
And remember, the arrival of PCI Express 5.0 drives won’t automatically do anything to change that. Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs already have PCIe Gen 5 support and AMD is expected to add it when the new Ryzen 7000 chips appear later this year. But all Gen 5 will guarantee is increased headroom for double the maximum theoretical throughput. OK, 16GB/s of potential storage bandwidth sounds bonkers. But we’d rather see the 4K grunt increased, given the choice.
Another issue worth noting is that SSD performance arguably doesn’t have a huge impact on game level load times, as our Final FantasyXIV:Shadowbringers benchmark results show.
Indeed, a certain well-known YouTuber recently lined up a row of PCs running games courtesy of everything from an old SATA SSD to the latest and greatest NVMe M.2 drive. In a blind test, it was clear that nobody could reliably identify what was ostensibly the much faster storage subsystem.
The caveat to that is the possible impact of Direct Storage, a technology first seen on the Xbox Series X and due on the PC imminently. The details of how it works are a story for another day. But it could make really high-performance storage far more important for PC gaming than ever before.
That aside, the gaming thing just serves to underline how important value is. In subjective terms, we think it would be a struggle to tell any of these drives apart, day to day, for almost any task, not just gaming. They are all very quick SSDs with quality TLC NAND, not nasty QLC stuff, eight memory channels, quad PCIe 4.0 lanes, plenty of DRAM cache, all the good stuff.
With that in mind, price matters an awful lot. That’s why the XPG Gammix S70 2TB impresses so much. $259 isn’t throwaway money. But you get so much for it, namely 2TB of seriously fast storage. Not only does it make the more expensive competition look largely redundant. It makes current graphics card pricing seem positively insane.
We can remember way back to the early days of solid-state storage on the PC, to playing with stuttering pre-TRIM Intel drives measuring a few tens of GB and wondering when it might be affordable to have lightning-fast solid-state drives for mass storage. That day has surely come with the likes of the XPG Gammix S70. Genuinely affordable and stupidly quick, it’s all the SSD almost anyone could ask for.