PCIe 4.0 vs. PCIe 3.0 SSDs: Latest drives from Corsair, Sabrent and Gigabyte tested

[Julio Franco]

Hard to please everybody, so we won't even try (ok we might, see the last paragraph) That said, this article is titled "PCIe 4.0 vs. PCIe 3.0 SSDs" and that's what we showed you. That won't make PCIe 4.0 drives a good buy, so we called it like we saw it and we pitted them against really tough competition.

And yes, owners of speedy SSDs don't need to upgrade, which is kind of the point.

Taken in full context, our storage recommendations (linked to and referenced in this article) have not changed much for the past year or so. NVMe is great for enthusiasts and power users, but most could do just as well with less radical SSD choices.

Now, there's also a commoditization of fast storage, where you can buy a 500GB Crucial MX500 for $65, but the much faster SSD 970 Evo is just $90.

Lastly, we hear you, so next up is a comparison of big 5400 RPM HDD vs big faster 7200rpm HDD vs old favorite mainstream SSD vs. good new mainstream SSD vs. top of the line NVMe SSD. Thoughts?

 

[BSim500]

Lastly, we hear you, so next up is a comparison of big 5400 RPM HDD vs big faster 7200rpm HDD vs old favorite mainstream SSD vs. good new mainstream SSD vs. top of the line NVMe SSD. Thoughts?

It's often the unusual 'roundup' comparisons that make the best reading on Techspot.

My suggestion to include at least one SATA was simply because that's what most people already own, ie, it's the SSD equivalent of CPU benchmarkers wisely continuing to include i5-2500K chips in Skylake reviews (they knew who was most ready to upgrade and from what). It's easy to compare the newest thing to just the previous one, but as we often see with those who buy a really good CPU and make it last 3-6 years, upgrades are done in cycles which don't always line up with marketing driven generations.

 

[Ludak021]

Wow, Intel is VERY optimistic lately 5 times more expensive and slowest of the bunch? Good job.

 

[arrowflash]

I would often run virus scans, sector scans, and defrag. Which is why I generally cap hard drives at 500GB, since these maintenance procedures takes so long.

Errr... you do know that you can split your HDDs in multiple partitions, right? Among the list of added benefits, making all the maintenance tasks you mentioned a lot easier to manage, and you can also defrag less often.

Having a 500+ GB HDD or SSD using a single partition is just a terrible practice IMO.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Having a 500+ GB HDD or SSD using a single partition is just a terrible practice IMO.

In my opinion that really depends on what the storage is being used for.

To make my meaning more clear. If there are only a few files using all that space. There is no reason why the bar can not be raised. If all files are small, even 500GB would be huge listing.

 

[bluetooth fairy]

Show me a motherboard without SATA. Even most laptops still have SATA, those that dont are typically thina nd light models you are not going to take apart anyway.

Just like how USB 3.0 is "going obsolete", SATA will stick around for a LONG time. I feel perfectly comfortable sating SATA will still be found on mainstream motherboard a decade from now, as will USB 3.0.

I mean, SSD & SATA combination is becoming obsolete. SSD's image is speedy drive, while in people's mind SATA is not good in this regard. So, storage devices tend to break into two different groups finally: one fast boot system drive on PCIe and a bunch of hard disk drives for actual storage.

While the thing is an SSD even on SATAII interface will be pretty fast. There's not a lot of devices on the market capable to R/W memory array on speeds much above 300 MB/s.

I mean I was even strengthen your point "SATA is enough for SSD, no need in PCIe". But marketing and why people buy things is another thing.

 

[bluetooth fairy]

Hard to please everybody, so we won't even try (ok we might, see the last paragraph) That said, this article is titled "PCIe 4.0 vs. PCIe 3.0 SSDs" and that's what we showed you. That won't make PCIe 4.0 drives a good buy, so we called it like we saw it and we pitted them against really tough competition.

And yes, owners of speedy SSDs don't need to upgrade, which is kind of the point.

Taken in full context, our storage recommendations (linked to and referenced in this article) have not changed much for the past year or so. NVMe is great for enthusiasts and power users, but most could do just as well with less radical SSD choices.

Now, there's also a commoditization of fast storage, where you can buy a 500GB Crucial MX500 for $65, but the much faster SSD 970 Evo is just $90.

Lastly, we hear you, so next up is a comparison of big 5400 RPM HDD vs big faster 7200rpm HDD vs old favorite mainstream SSD vs. good new mainstream SSD vs. top of the line NVMe SSD. Thoughts?

I'm actually using an SSD with whisper quiet 5400 2.5" HDD. And I think I'm gonna stick to this kind setup. But I'm not sure, if it worth to upgrade to faster 7200 RPM 2.5". I mean I even not interested in typical 3.5" devices, because I found much comfortable combination for quiet home room (at night).

 

[dalpilot]

Unless you have storage intensive applications the real world increase in productivity seems to be somewhat minimal from SATA SSD to NVME PCIe 3.0 and especially moving up to 4.0. You can get a excellent quality NVME 3.0 SSD for around $60 for 512 GB and around $100 for 1 TB. That is more than enough for boot, programs, games, etc with spinning storage for media. Hard to justify extra cost for X570 and PCIe 4.0 over B450/X470 for AMD processors.

 

[Danny101]

just to be clear... you arnt occasionally defraging your ssds for what ever reason are you? can skip it... isnt necessarily knowing how terribad that is for the longevity and useless performance wise.

You're right about not needing to defrag and I made sure to disable it. I have noticed that there are processes being run on the SSDs and I assume it's the garbage collection or similiar process being run and it does slow down the system during those times.

 

[Danny101]

While what you say is very correct, if you run them overnight and regularly there's next to no downtime. Even my 10tb drives don't take 3 days and they don't get defragged often. I'm currently running about 100tb and those processes don't detract even on an old system.

I just simply run out of patience with hard drives and yes I allow overnight processes to run. I just wish Windows was smart enough to not pause, sleep, or by any means pause this process which I often find incomplete the following morning and have to summarily make it continue. That is beyond frustrating when I expect something to be done and it isn't.

 

[Danny101]

Errr... you do know that you can split your HDDs in multiple partitions, right? Among the list of added benefits, making all the maintenance tasks you mentioned a lot easier to manage, and you can also defrag less often.

Having a 500+ GB HDD or SSD using a single partition is just a terrible practice IMO.

I've considered that, but I was concerned about head thrashing when partitioning a drive in this way.

 

[Markoni35]

Lastly, we hear you, so next up is a comparison of big 5400 RPM HDD vs big faster 7200rpm HDD vs old favorite mainstream SSD vs. good new mainstream SSD vs. top of the line NVMe SSD. Thoughts?

If you could also add 3.5" floppies, a few basic magnetic tapes, and maybe just one punctured paper tape, that would be perfect.

 

[Markoni35]

BTW, congrats, this article is perfectly formatted. First the benchmark title, then the chart, then the comment. As opposed to your articles from 2018, this one is well formatted. Keep up the good work.

 

[jpuroila]

When I buy SSD, I'm striking the best balance I can get between price and storage capacity.

As of 2019 September, 1TB of QLC SSD storage is about $100 and 2TB is about $200.

I have my eye on Microcenter who has an intel 2TB 660p m.2 for $179 which would be perfect for my gaming laptop.

For my desktop I can choose either a Crucial or Samsung model for just $199 -$229.

I haven't bought another SSD yet because Black Friday is right around the corner and I'm sure I'll save $20 - $30 by waiting.

I haven't seen any software that truly demands more performance.

So why pay for all this high speed SSD performance if I needn't?

Last I checked there's very little reason to get QLC. For the same price as Samsung's QVO, you can get a good TLC SSD such as ADATA SU800 that's better in every way.

 

[Puiu]

Hard to please everybody, so we won't even try (ok we might, see the last paragraph) That said, this article is titled "PCIe 4.0 vs. PCIe 3.0 SSDs" and that's what we showed you. That won't make PCIe 4.0 drives a good buy, so we called it like we saw it and we pitted them against really tough competition.

And yes, owners of speedy SSDs don't need to upgrade, which is kind of the point.

Taken in full context, our storage recommendations (linked to and referenced in this article) have not changed much for the past year or so. NVMe is great for enthusiasts and power users, but most could do just as well with less radical SSD choices.

Now, there's also a commoditization of fast storage, where you can buy a 500GB Crucial MX500 for $65, but the much faster SSD 970 Evo is just $90.

Lastly, we hear you, so next up is a comparison of big 5400 RPM HDD vs big faster 7200rpm HDD vs old favorite mainstream SSD vs. good new mainstream SSD vs. top of the line NVMe SSD. Thoughts?

That's a nice comparison although I've seen it done quite a few times already. Can you add to something that I'm interested in? I want to know how a new 4.0 NVME works on PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0, if there is any difference beyond the max read/write speeds. This should tell us if they made any changes beyond the bandwidth, if there any bugs they need to iron out and if it is worth using one on in my laptop which has a slot for PCIe 3.0 NVME drives (4x lanes) or just go with my initial "best bang for my buck" policy

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Last I checked there's very little reason to get QLC. For the same price as Samsung's QVO, you can get a good TLC SSD such as ADATA SU800 that's better in every way.

A Bunch of QLC's available at my nearest microcenter. All of which are 2TB for $179 - $250

 

[jameslr]

It would also be nice to see a budget SATA drive (eg, 860 EVO / MX500) included for reference for obvious reasons (they make up the bulk of SSD sales and it's more likely that someone who's outgrown an old 850 EVO will be looking to upgrade than someone who bought a 970 PRO 6 months ago).

When you can get an NVMe SSD for often $15 to $25 more than the SATA equivalent SSD here in the states, it doesn't make much sense to get the SATA version of the SSD. A year or two ago you were paying a premium for NVMe SSDs. Today? Not so much.

Why pay for speed you dont need?

I have a first gen NVMe drive, a samsung 950 pro. I also have a 2TB crucial MX500 and a 512 GB MX 300. According to synthetic benchmarks, the 950 pro is substantially faster then either crucial drive in reads, writes, and IOPS.

IRL, you cant tell any difference. Games took just as long to load with NVMe as they did with the crucials. Windows booted a whole 1 secod faster (yippee). File transfers were all limited by external media; most USB 3 flash drives cant keep up with a good sata III drive, external HDDs obviously are much slower, and external NASs are limited by either the gbE interface or USB 3, or their internal drive speed.

NVMe has amazing transfer speeds to another NVMe drive, and is useful for apps like photoshop and video editing sotware where RAW files get larger by the day. For most consumers, there is 0 advantage, even today, for going NVMe over Sata, so why spend $25 more for pointless bragging rights? That $25 can buy faster RAM, a better CPU cooler, or a AIB version of a GPU, all of which would provide tangible results, OR could be used to get a larger capacity drive instead.

The main reason I would buy a Samsung Pro drive is the significantly better warranty over the EVO when it comes to TBW (TeraBytes Written). Your argument about speed is valid. You can't really tell the difference between the two for practical purposes.

The 1TB 960 EVO drive has a 3 year / 400 TBW warranty versus the Pro having a 5 year/ 800 TBW warranty at the same capacity. Pro drives are more geared toward the power user though.

 

[fktech]

My PC buying is frozen until tech gets its s@#$ together.

 

[bluetooth fairy]

The main reason I would buy a Samsung Pro drive is the significantly better warranty over the EVO when it comes to TBW (TeraBytes Written). Your argument about speed is valid. You can't really tell the difference between the two for practical purposes.

The 1TB 960 EVO drive has a 3 year / 400 TBW warranty versus the Pro having a 5 year/ 800 TBW warranty at the same capacity. Pro drives are more geared toward the power user though.

IDK for whom are these TBW numbers. My ~9 years old (17700 hrs power on) SSD shows 15.6 TBW (and 2x more reads). I'm neither running torrent client on it though, nor prosumer apps. Just regular system boot drive filled with windows and programs.

 

[ubronan]

This test is not really showing anything new, anyone who owns a nvme ssd already knows it hardly makes a dent into ssd performance. The speed is only visible on the synthetic benchmarks.
Real world they often do not perform better than a good normal ssd.
And yes normal ssd's are either able to match or beat nvme ssd's ib certain tasks the difference is so small that the massive premium price of the nvme is really not worth buying them unless you have work for them where they can show their muscles. creating stuff like videos, advanced audio editing so work related tasks for short.
Actually if you have enterprise ssd's they often perform very close or even better if you make a raid0 couple of these much cheaper drives.
I have seen many enterprise ssd's being dumped mostly because the companies need larger ones, and believe me even very old ones are a very good buy. True your never sure it will not fail but I can prove that they are made to last I got 2 very old 60 GB intel 520 ssd,s from q1/2012 and guess what they where one of the first released and they still run as cache in my nas and never ever failed. Every test shows they are still 100% ok. Yes I got 2 times a warning that a block was reported bad but a simple format of the drive fixed it. But even my 4 intel x18-m ssd's from 2008 are still running strong. I got these from a collega system admin who took them out of a reserve server who was going for scrapping.
Since they had only a copy of the windows server on them, the boss gave permission to me using them to test upgrades to see if errors appeared in the software and see if they work well.
To prevent downtime at work.
Yes they have all parameters to the max when you check them but this far no real fails at all.
And they run now as in raid0 as temp drive storage , so every 3 days they get whiped automagical and do their work like the where bought yesterday. Do mind these drives have outlived their expected life time already.
Besides some problems in the paste with certain ssd's dying very fast from ocz once, I must admit that horror stories about ssd dying fast is moved to the fantasy story book for me.

Again they can fail one day but they might end up running even much longer without failing. So 12 years old and still flawless. Even my oldest ssd's which are over 15 year old did not show signs of failure when I replaced them by the larger intel ones. But they simply became too slow to use for the constant read/write large zip/rar files
Nothing is more addictive than speed .... especially when hadling files
The faster the better, thats why we still see multi serial scsi devices in servers because they are still very fast, it all depends on the workload ofcourse at some tasks you really want sata ssd or nvme ssd's.

 

[Tom01]

So why pay for all this high speed SSD performance if I needn't?

Because faster is better.

 

[daveteauk]

When I get a system that supports NVMe as a boot drive. I will consider NVMe over SATA. Until then I will only consider SATA.

If your system does NOT support NVMe as a boot drive, then you SERIOUSLY need to ugrade/update!!! As your system doesn't, then you have no option but to use SATA have you?

 

[daveteauk]

I wouldn't trust a single bit of my data with any SSD that needs a huge heatsink not to burst in flames and even then, still needs throttling ocasionally. And it baffles me that anyone would trust them, while paying a premium for that.

Standard high-end SATA SSDs already offer more than enough speed and I feel my data is safer with them.

Gen 3 M.2 SSD don't have heatsinks, so why not relax and enjoy blistering speeds with one of them?? Also, I'd rather 'trust' my data to any form factor of SSD than to a spinning drive that WILL fail, at some stage, and is nowhere near as reliable as any SSD.

 

[daveteauk]

Show me a motherboard without SATA. Even most laptops still have SATA, those that dont are typically thina nd light models you are not going to take apart anyway.

Just like how USB 3.0 is "going obsolete", SATA will stick around for a LONG time. I feel perfectly comfortable sating SATA will still be found on mainstream motherboard a decade from now, as will USB 3.0.

USB4 is just around the corner, as is PCIe v5, and they'll join in with DDR5 on a MoBo anytime soon, within 18months IMO. PCIe4 was late, and v5 is ready to go, and PCIe v6 is being developed right now. What we need for PCIe v4 is for the controllers to release all of v4's potential, as 5000MB/s is still a long way away off its capability.

 

[daveteauk]

I've considered that, but I was concerned about head thrashing when partitioning a drive in this way.

There is actually LESS 'head thrashing' when defragging a partitioned drive, as the head/arm/stylus moves less, as it's only working on part of the surface, not all of it.