Friday, November 12th 2021
UL Announces 3DMark SSD Storage Benchmark
For more than 20 years, 3DMark has been gamers' first choice for benchmarking the latest graphics cards and processors. Today, we're taking 'The Gamer's Benchmark' into a new area with the 3DMark Storage Benchmark, a dedicated component test for measuring the gaming performance of SSDs, hybrid drives, and other storage devices.
With fast modern SSD storage, loading times are shorter, levels restart faster, and there are fewer interruptions to your gameplay. PC gamers can now choose from a wide range of high-performance storage options from the fastest PCI Express 4.0 and NVMe devices down to cheaper SATA SSDs and high-capacity hybrid drives.
Unfortunately, many of the tools for measuring storage performance were developed when HDDs were the most common drive type. And it's hard to relate results from those synthetic benchmarks to real-world performance. The 3DMark Storage Benchmark is a dedicated component test that measures the gaming performance of the fastest modern PC storage hardware. It supports all the latest storage technologies and focuses on practical, real-world gaming performance.
Real-world gaming performance
The problem with many storage tests is that they use artificial, synthetic workloads to measure performance under ideal conditions. Results from these tests are hard to relate to practical, everyday needs, which is why the 3DMark Storage Benchmark focuses on measuring real-world gaming performance.
Storage activity consists of input and output operations. It is possible to record these operations while the storage device is performing a task. These recordings are called traces.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance, such as:
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark is compatible with all modern storage devices and can be used to test both internal and external drives.
The test produces a 3DMark Storage Benchmark Score as a measure of performance. As usual with 3DMark, a higher score means better performance. Here are a few reference scores for context.
Pricing & Availability
The Storage Benchmark DLC is available now for 2.99 USD on Steam and the UL Benchmarks website for 3DMark Advanced Edition while Professional Edition owners with a valid annual license will receive the benchmark as a free update.
Source:
UL Benchmarks
With fast modern SSD storage, loading times are shorter, levels restart faster, and there are fewer interruptions to your gameplay. PC gamers can now choose from a wide range of high-performance storage options from the fastest PCI Express 4.0 and NVMe devices down to cheaper SATA SSDs and high-capacity hybrid drives.
Real-world gaming performance
The problem with many storage tests is that they use artificial, synthetic workloads to measure performance under ideal conditions. Results from these tests are hard to relate to practical, everyday needs, which is why the 3DMark Storage Benchmark focuses on measuring real-world gaming performance.
Storage activity consists of input and output operations. It is possible to record these operations while the storage device is performing a task. These recordings are called traces.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance, such as:
- Loading Battlefield V from launch to the main menu.
- Loading Call of Duty : Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
- Loading Overwatch from launch to the main menu.
- Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.
- Installing The Outer Worlds from the Epic Games Launcher.
- Saving game progress in The Outer Worlds.
- Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike : Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark is compatible with all modern storage devices and can be used to test both internal and external drives.
The test produces a 3DMark Storage Benchmark Score as a measure of performance. As usual with 3DMark, a higher score means better performance. Here are a few reference scores for context.
- Intel Optane SSD 900P 280 GB (PCI Express 3 M.2) - 4,241
- Samsung SSD 980 PRO 500 GB (PCI Express 4 M.2) - 2,854
- WD_BLACK SN750 NVMe 500 GB (PCI Express 3 M.2) - 2,014
- Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1 TB (SATA III) - 1,193
Pricing & Availability
The Storage Benchmark DLC is available now for 2.99 USD on Steam and the UL Benchmarks website for 3DMark Advanced Edition while Professional Edition owners with a valid annual license will receive the benchmark as a free update.
33 Comments on UL Announces 3DMark SSD Storage Benchmark
Really wish for a variaty of tests on that to measure different storage stengths
However, seeing a 5 year old niche Intel product with a much higher score than a Samsung 980 Pro reminded me why I don't trust Bapco and PCMark series of benchmarks: somehow, Intel branded products score much higher than other brands. Somehow, 0.1 second difference in a specific product feature in Intel branded product leads to hundreds or thousands of higher score in the overal score for the Intel branded product.
On the other hand, whatever additional features products from other brands have, they don't get "special points".
If spending $100 extra to save all of 2 seconds, Is the sort of thing that you can't live without and gets you aroused, then have at it.
It is faster than the 980PRO as top linear write speeds do not matter at all and can't be used as a metric.
Intel sponsored that year's event to launch the SSD, and gave the company 200 or so to give away.
My score is even higher than the put result.
The test is actually a heavy read test, the pSLC cache exhaustion shouldn't matter that much, unless it is really small. Here actually the inherited flaws of current NAND controller architectures creep out.
Optane isn't about the speed, like many argue here, it is about stability and how you can hammer it and it remains the same. It is a perfect OS drive.
Why? This way 3DMark SSD SB does not give us anything new...
Would be sweeter if they didn’t make you pay for it.. because you already bought the program, and chances are you paid for the other “extras”..
graphics 1/10
I am also considering NVME 22110 sized older Optanes, if some emerges up around me. I don't need the pcie4 bursts, as they give you nothing.
We are forgetting the Samsung Z-NAND also, Sammy is really late this time to reply to the P5800X. It would be fun to see someone sporting Samsung Z-SSD SZ985.
There are several open source tools that try to do this to a varying degree of success, but are still miles better than this lol worthy "test".
www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SSS_PTS_Client_v1.2.pdf read at least up to page number 20 to get an idea why this "test" is shit.