Crucial's P5 M.2 SSD is finally a design for the high-end NVMe market. The drive uses a completely new controller made by Micron we've never seen before. While synthetic results are just alright, the real-life performance numbers in our Crucial P5 review paint a much better picture.
The Samsung 870 QVO is the company's new QLC-based SSD that reaches capacities of up to 8 TB. In our Samsung 870 QVO review we're taking a close look not only at synthetics, but also real-life performance, which is surprisingly weak, especially considering they want $115 for the reviewed 1 TB variant.
In our Seagate BarraCuda 120 review we'll take a look at synthetic and real-life performance of this 2.5" SATA SSD. According to our test results, the drive is among the fastest you can buy in this form factor, and write sustainability is pretty much perfect, there is no TLC write hole.
The Sabrent Rocket is powered by the combination of a Phison controller and Micron TLC flash, and a DRAM chip is included too. Performance results are good, especially write speeds are high, and pricing is low at $150 for the reviewed 1 TB version.
The Kingston A2000 has recently received a firmware update, which makes a big difference in performance. It now rivals the Samsung 970 EVO, at much better pricing. With just $128 for the tested 1 TB version, or 13 cents per GB, the A2000 offers better value than most SSDs on the market.
At just $115 for the 1 TB version, it'll be hard to find a more affordable M.2 NVMe drive than the ADATA Swordfish. Despite the low price, performance is still very decent; there's now very little reason to buy a SATA drive instead of an NVMe SSD.
Last year, we found a bug in Kingston's SSD firmware, which inflicted a significant performance penalty. Now, a software fix is publicly available, and it makes a big difference. The Kingston KC2000 is now the fastest SSD we have ever tested; it even manages to beat the Samsung 970 Pro.
The ADATA Falcon SSD is priced at just $130 for the 1 TB version, or 13 cents per gigabyte, which makes it one of the most affordable SSDs on the market. In our review, we found decent performance that beats QLC, and ADATA is even including a small heatsink that helps with thermal throttling.
Priced at just $132 for 1 TB, the Silicon Power P34A80 SSD is one of the most affordable high-performance TLC drives on the market. It uses the fast Silicon Motion SM2262 controller, paired with 3D TLC flash from Intel/Micron.
Lexar's NM610 is built using a Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, paired with Intel 3D TLC flash. The pseudo-SLC cache is rather large at 128 GB, which ensures big write bursts get handled at full speed. Pricing at $155 for a DRAM-less SSD seems a bit high, though.
We test a new firmware update for the HP EX950, which fixes a performance issue and makes the drive the fastest SSD we ever reviewed, beating even the Samsung 970 Pro in real-life tests. With a price of just $270 for the 2 TB version, the EX950 is very affordable, too.
Team Group's MP33 SSD is based on 96-layer TLC NAND from Toshiba paired with a new Phison controller that achieves impressive sustained writes and has the best thermals we've ever seen. Even when fully loaded, without airflow, there is no thermal throttling.
Priced at $130 for the 1 TB version, the Sabrent Rocket Q SSD is one of the most affordable SSDs on the market. It uses a new Phison E12S controller, which has better thermal performance and can operate with smaller DRAM cache. Write speeds are impressive due to 250 GB of pseudo-SLC cache.
The Addlink X70 RGB SSD lets you control its lighting through motherboard software from all the big vendors, so you can sync it to the rest of your system. Performance is good, too, especially random and sequential writes. The preinstalled heatsink works well, keeping temperatures in check.
Western Digital's WD Red SA500 is a solid-state-disk optimized for NAS usage, either as cache drive or for primary storage. With a price of $140 for 1 TB, the SSD is priced more aggressively than Seagate's IronWolf 110 NAS competitor, yet offers similar performance and still retains the five-year warranty.
The Team Group Delta Max RGB SSD offers truly impressive RGB illumination that can be synced with your motherboard's lighting effects. Each of the LEDs can be controlled separately, both in color and brightness. Performance is also very decent due to the combination of the SMI controller with some Samsung TLC flash.
With just $50 for the tested 512 GB model, the BIOSTAR M700 M.2 NVMe SSD is the most affordable SSD we ever reviewed, even cheaper than most 2.5" SATA drives. Thanks to its fast PCIe x4 3.0 interface paired with an SMI controller, performance is good, too. Is there any reason left to buy a 2.5" SATA SSD?
The Team Group T-Force Vulcan SSD is priced extremely competitively with $50 for 500 GB, yet delivers outstanding performance. What's surprising is that the drive comes in both TLC and MLC variants, at the same price, but there's no way to know before buying. We tested both models in our review, with surprising results.
The Seagate FireCuda 510 SSD impresses with transfer rates reaching 4 GB/s; random reads go up to 475k IOPS. Under the hood, the drive uses Toshiba 3D TLC flash paired with Hynix DDR4 DRAM. Sustained transfer rates are excellent, even when the large SLC cache is exhausted, and thermals are good, too.
The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G is the first M.2 SSD with adjustable RGB lighting effects. It not only looks great, but performs well, too. Thanks to 3.3 GB/s read and 2.3 GB/s writes, delivered real-life performance is comparable to the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market.
The Team Group Cardea II M.2 NVMe SSD comes with a large pre-installed heatsink that adds excellent cooling capability to prevent any sort of thermal throttling. Another highlight is the good sustained write performance, which ends up at over 1 GB/s even though TLC flash is used.
Priced at just $89.99 for the 1 TB version, the Patriot P200 is the perfect solution for users wanting large affordable storage to keep all their games on SSD. Even though it's based on TLC, sustained write performance is amazing, and there is no visible speed drop.
AMD's new Ryzens are the first desktop processors to support PCI-Express 4.0, which doubles transfer rates over PCIe 3.0. We test real-life performance gains using the 2 TB Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD, which reaches over 5 GB/s in sequential speeds.
The Seagate IronWolf 110 SSD is the first solid-state drive optimized for use in a NAS. It comes with the best and most consistent write speeds we've seen in a long time. On top of the five-year warranty, Seagate includes a data recovery service that will recover your files in case of failure.
Priced at a stunning $110, the ADATA SX6000 Pro 1 TB is one of the most affordable NVMe drives on the market, and a heatsink is included, too, to help avoid thermal throttling. In our performance testing, we see decent performance that's within a few percentages of other, more expensive M.2 SSDs.
