The best internal SSDs with high read and write speeds

Over the past few years, there has been a revolution in the SSD drive market - the budget segment has been captured by inexpensive and at the same time excellent bufferless controllers that demonstrate performance at the level of much more expensive Samsung EVO Plus series drives. A clear example of this revolution is the A-Data XPG GAMMIX S70 drive, which claims to be the most popular M.2 SSD with a PCI-E 4.0 interface.

So, the S70 Blade is built on the basis of the upgraded Innogrit IG5220 platform, which has proven itself well in drives from Patriot and A-Data. Instead of the usual 96-layer memory, it uses perhaps the fastest and most advanced 176-layer flash memory from Micron. Unlike most bufferless budget SSDs, the potential owner of this drive will receive a 1 GB DDR4 memory buffer. Well, the picture is completed by support for the PCI-E 4.0 interface and high operating speeds: 7400 MB/s during reading, 5500 MB/s during writing.

It is equally important that in real use scenarios (example: video rendering, compiling, archiving), the drive maintains stable performance even during lengthy copy or write operations. By the way, such high standards fully meet the requirements of the Sony PS5 console. Plus, the drive has a number of advanced features (256-bit AES encryption, E2E Data Protection, RAID, LDPC), which are rarely found all at once in other inexpensive SSDs. But there is also a downside to the coin - like any top-end M.2 drive, the S70 Blade gets very hot. Without a built-in heatsink, the controller can warm up to almost 100 ℃ in stress tests; with a heatsink, the temperature usually stays around 80 ℃.

The PX series from the Polish brand GOODRAM comes out with affordable 2.5 format drives that combine high quality control, moderately high data exchange speeds and memory controllers that are good by the standards of the budget segment. The PX600 was one of the biggest hits of last year and was widely recommended for use in gaming PCs and consoles. The PX700 drive, released in December 2023, successfully develops the ideas of its predecessor: the controller is more solid, the linear speeds are faster, the IOPS is higher, and the heating is lower.

As the brain, the GOODRAM PX700 uses a four-channel bufferless controller from Maxiotek with support for the PCI-E 4.0 bus, which, traditionally for inexpensive SSDs in 2023, lacks a full-fledged DRAM buffer, but can work with modern QLX memory and supports Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology. which uses existing system memory instead of dedicated DRAM. In this way, the manufacturer saves significant money without any significant loss of quality and productivity.

And thanks to its built-in thermal protection mechanism and high thermal conductivity graphene pad, the PX700 control controller doesn't suffer from overheating during particularly intensive tasks. Thus, the drive can achieve read speeds of up to 7400 MB/s without suffering from sudden drops in performance, has a 5-year warranty and is much cheaper than flagship SSD drives from Samsung, Corsair and WD. It seems that we have finally come to the point where SSD manufacturers have gotten rid of all childhood pains, producing high-quality drives in any price segment.

At the end of 2021, one of the leading players in the memory market, the American company Kingston, updated the lineup of its solid-state drives, introducing 2 completely new lines of SSD drives. The KC3000 models are designed for workstation owners and are designed for heavy tasks like 3D rendering, while the FURY Renegade SSDs were created with an eye on gamers and new generation games with hi-res textures and seamless open-world environments. It's Renegade that we'll talk about.

Thanks to the use of the new PCI-E 4.0 interface and the Phison E18 controller specially designed for it, the drive from Kingston makes the most of the provided technical capabilities. It provides data exchange at speeds of up to 7300 MB/s for linear read operations and up to 6000 MB/s for write operations. It is also capable of performing up to 1,000,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Without undue modesty, this is one of the fastest solid state machines in our memory. For example, the test Fury Renegade loaded the first level in the famously slow Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 9.6 seconds. For comparison, the reference Samsung Evo 980 Pro took 12.4 seconds, and the average NVMe boot time usually stretches to 20 – 25 seconds.

The signature feature of the Fury Renegade is the not-so-typical graphene-aluminum heat spreader, which makes the SSD thin and low. It is worth noting that in stress tests it worked 3.5 out of 5, because... Over time, the memory controller warmed up to 85 C°, which is not good. However, in everyday use in game mode, such a problem was not observed. And this is in the limited and not the coldest space of a gaming laptop. We are sure that Fury Renegade coped with the new generation consoles PS5 and Xbox Series X without problems. If not, you can always buy an external radiator. It also has one of the largest rewrite resources among models in this class - 1000 TB versus the typical 700 GB.

Despite the fact that Samsung has lost its status as a trendsetter in the SSD market, its products continue to be respected and regularly appear in top sales and various recommendations. For example, the 990 PRO drive, released at the end of 2023, claims to be one of the fastest SSDs supporting the PCI-E 4.0 interface - its maximum read speed reaches 7450 MB/s, while file writing is carried out at a maximum speed of 6900 MB/s. With. And if the read speed is usually limited by the capabilities of the PCI-E interface, then the write speed has increased by almost 40% compared to its predecessor Samsung 980 PRO.

At the same time, the 990 PRO has significantly increased I/O operations per second when working with 4K blocks: the manufacturer promises 1,550 thousand IOPS during writing and 1,200 thousand when reading data. This is a fairly significant speed increase, which can be equally useful for professional work with databases, media files, data virtualization, etc. When it comes to gaming, this performance boost can be very useful for speeding up loading times for open-world games. For example, at the presentation of the drive, Samsung representatives boasted that the drive only needs one second to load the world from Forspoken.

The key factors behind the improvements to the Samsung 990 PRO drive were Samsung's 176-layer flash memory and the new Samsung Pascal controller, manufactured using an advanced 8-nanometer process technology. And this is a very smart decision, because instead of chasing the virtual numbers of the PCI-E 5.0 interface, Korean engineers focused on refining the Pascal controller. For example, they optimized the TurboWrite hybrid cache, making it much more difficult to fill up the memory buffer. The use of hardware automation technology has made it possible to increase the efficiency per watt by one and a half times compared to its predecessor 980 PRO. Well, the temperature of the controller under intense loads does not exceed 72°C. In general, Samsung can be congratulated on returning to the game - they have created a truly serious SSD, which is one way or another ahead of 99% of its competitors.

At the end of 2022, WD introduced a current update to its Hi-End drive for gamers , the WD Black SN850 with the X console. Unlike the original model, the SN850X uses a more modern 112-layer TLC NAND memory from SanDisk, and the SanDisk B2 control controller has been slightly improved characteristics. In particular, the maximum write speed has increased from 5300 MB/s to 6300 MB/s, IOPS has improved, and the average operating temperature when using a heatsink has decreased from 85 ℃ to 78 ℃.

Since the drive is part of the WD Black line and is gaming in nature, the manufacturer has added support for a special operating mode, Game Mode 2.0, which is activated at the firmware level in the WD Dashboard software. And if the first version of Game Mode simply turned off SSD power saving, the second version has become significantly wiser, having learned to more skillfully manage throttling, optimize the execution of game scripts, etc.

In stress tests, the drive performed more than worthy, easily coping with most standard loads. The controller did not suffer from throttling, the read and write speeds remained at plus or minus the stated level, the DRAM buffer came to the rescue when heavily loaded with large amounts of data, and the drive itself easily made friends with the PS5 console. I was especially pleased with the low latency levels in open world games. The only negative is that without a radiator the heating level is still quite high, and the radiator turned out to be quite dense and it is not a fact that it will fit into a conventional gaming laptop or ultrabook. Therefore, before purchasing, it is better to check the presence of M.2 zone cooling in the motherboard or laptop.