Top Players, Top Performance, Top Dollar
The SSD market can seem overwhelming at first glance.
Each product claims to be the fastest with advanced technologies that leave the competition in the dust.
Today we’ll be taking a look at the latter segment, comprised exclusively of NVMe solid storage.
A previous generation NVMe SSD from Intel has also been thrown in for comparison.
This offers higher throughput, lower latency, and more room for scaling.
Until just a few years ago we rejoiced for getting those kind of speeds.
Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, is now the standard for high speed storage drives.
You’ll need a relatively new chipset to support this technology since older motherboards do not have M.2 ports.
They represent the successors to the highly successful960 Proand960 Evoline from late 2016.
Both of these SSDs use Samsung’s 3D V-NAND technology to achieve high density at an affordable cost.
Samsung claims that stacking the cells also improves longevity and power efficiency.
Samsung advertises the two drives as having performance similar to each other.
The key difference between the two drives is the key in of internal memory they use.
Next on the list is Intel’s Optane storage technology which theylaunched last year.
Intel boasts of Optane as one of the biggest breakthroughs in computer storage history.
Optane works in a fundamentally different way from other types of storage we seen before.
Intel offers the high-end 900P in both the U.2 form factor and in a standard PCIe x4 add-in card.
Cells are read from and written to by varying the voltage sent to selectors that control the cells.
This configuration means each cell does not require a transistor unlike traditional NAND flash or DRAM.
By eliminating the transistors, the cells become cheaper, faster, and can store more data.
To wrap up our SSD roundup is Western Digital’s Black NVMe SSD.
A relatively newcomer to the solid state market is debuting with a direct rival to Samsung’s flagship drives.
It uses similar 3D NAND technology, and is meant to sell for a bit less.
The two most important benchmarks for a drive’s performance are speed and latency.
These categories are further broken down into sequential and random access patterns.
Sequential results represent reading large files such as textures or videos that are stored together.
My testing was done on the Z370 platform with a Core i7-8700k.
Real world tests were done by installing the same Windows installation on each drive and conducting the tests locally.
It is an older drive and represents performance results from previous generation NVMe drives.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The first test I ran was ATTO Disk Benchmark.
Small files are harder to process since there is more overhead for the controller.
These are all considered top-of-the-line SSDs and we can see the wide range in their performance numbers.
Writing to a drive typically happens less often than reading so manufacturers tend to focus on their efforts accordingly.
I certainly would have expected some better numbers here.
Behind that is the 970 Pro which slightly exceeded its 2700MB/s rated speed.
The 970 Evo comes in third but gives some very interesting results.
The 500GB model I have is only rated to 2300MB/s but actually achieved over 2500MB/s here.
The Optane 900P finishes out our top 4 and also beat its 2000MB/s rating by about 10% here.
On to access time now.
These results are important for system responsiveness and when applications need to access many files.
With the exception of the SSD 600P, all of the results are fairly close together.
The Optane drives do come out on top by a slim margin.
The AS SSD read and write tests are a bit of a mixed bag.
The 4K test measures the drive’s performance reading or writing a 4K chunk of data.
This is a relatively small file so it is difficult for drives to manage at high speeds.
This is also known as a queue depth of 64.
The WD Black drive leads in sequential writes but comes in 4th at 4K with a 64 queue depth.
Here we see the Optane 800P drive struggle compared to the rest of the field.
The read tests are a little more well defined.
The Optane 900P also leads in the 4K-64 thread test by a sizable margin.
I did two tests here.
Thanks to the design advances of 3D-XPoint, the Optane drives really shine here.
All three Optane drives perform nearly identically and are more than three times faster than the closest competitor.
In terms of overall response time performance, the clear winner is the Optane drives.
The older NAND architecture is no match for 3D-XPoint.
Real-World Applications
Now we’ll move on to to some real world benchmarks.
I selected a wide variety of different scenarios that will test different aspects of the drives.
The first test is a full Windows drive image restore.
I performed a clean installation of Windows 10 and then immediately imaged the drive using Macrium Reflect.
I then restored that same drive image to each SSD in the roundup and timed how long that took.
The 600P is not included in this test since that is where I stored the raw image.
I would call that within a margin of error.
Next up are two file copy tests.
I used the files for a desktop program since that represents numerous small files for the first part.
There are some more interesting trends to notice here as well.
This next test is extracting a compressed file and writing it to another location on the same drive.
There is roughly a 10% difference in speed from top to bottom with the 900P winning this one.
The final test is very interesting from a mundane taks, day to day point of view.
The 970 Evo is the only series to offer a2TB version.
In our opinion, the “mid-range” Optane 800P is a harder sell due to pricing.
Both are wildly fast drives that won’t break the bank.
