Until recently it was safe to assume that a comparison of individual high-end M.2 PCIe SSDs would result in small differences in terms of gaming performance. The gap has however grown wider between Gen3 and high-end Gen4 or Gen5. Microsoft’s DirectStorage may widen it further as the API makes its way into more new releases. Will it Work on my Laptop/Desktop PC? Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to launch. Mind you, these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more; in other words, more than just the program. Still, this is interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps. The PCIe 4 testing was done on an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core mounted on a MSI MEG X570motherboard with the same software and components, minus the add-in cards.

Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus is a lot more affordable than the PRO but very close in terms of actual performance. Although it doesn’t use high-end MLC NAND, this drive is still among the best in the PCIe Gen 3 category. The difference between an SSD and a hard drive regarding user experience is clearly noticeable. To date, the effect of shifting from one type of SSD to another is not nearly as dramatic, at least when it comes to gaming. These are some results from our own testing:

Firmwaredownloads

Consumer SSDs became common once density increased to two bits per cell, also known as multi-level cell or MLC. Most high-end drives today use the even denser triple-level cell, or TLC, memory type, whereas some budget SSDs use quad-level cell or QLC NAND.

Unlike most other drives we've tested in this category, the FireCuda 520 does not include its own surface-mounted heatsink. While some drives, like the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440, come with a sleek, slim heatsink (in the case of the Cardea, a graphene/copper-based strip), and options like the Corsair Force Series MP600 have chunky, removable metal heatsinks mounted on top, the FireCuda 520 has neither. This benchmark consists of a range of gaming-related workloads that often apply to other usage scenarios as well. Its scores are based on the average bandwidth from a range of tasks that include loading, installing, saving, moving, and recording a number of specific games. In other words, it’s not a universal proxy for overall performance but one of the better ones for consumer workloads. 1. Fastest NVMe M.2 SSD: Crucial T700 (and T-Force Z540)The magic ingredient appears to be its 232-layer NAND from Micron, which is able to propel this drive all the way to the top of several benchmark charts versus other Gen4 drives. We have recently observed the same trend even in DRAM-less SSDs like the impressive Teamgroup MP44, but the Crucial T500 does employ an LPDDR4 DRAM buffer that gives it an edge in many workloads. The Seagate FireCuda 540 is one of the latest additions to the Gen5 space and it uses the same E26 controller as all of its current competitors. It is also equipped with the same 232-layer TLC NAND as all but the Crucial T700, meaning that it runs at 1,600 MT/s. What it shares with its competitors from the first batch of Gen5 SSDs, however, is that it requires efficient cooling to avoid overheating and throttling. If you don’t have a decent heat spreader on your motherboard, it is probably a good idea to opt for the T700 version with an included heatsink. Other PCIe 5.0 SSDs such as the Aorus Gen5 10000 and Corsair MP700, all of which also use the Phison E26, can reach sequential read speeds of around 10,000 MB/s, but the Crucial T700 goes all the way up to 12,400 MB/s. What actually impressed us the most about the FireCuda 520 was that it maintained an almost 1.7GBps pace through our full 450GB copy test over PCIe 3, copying the file in 4 minutes, 10 seconds. We don’t have a chart for that yet, but some bargain NVMe SSDs can take up to 15 minutes. Not that you’ll be copying 450GB very often.