As more NVMe SSDs arrive, one of the biggest complaints is always the additional cost. Sure, having an SSD is great and we’ve called it the single biggest upgrade you can make to an older PC, but once you move from a hard drive to an SSD, you’ve made the big jump. But NVMe SSDs are even faster than SATA drives. If you have a modern PC, it will likely have an M.2 slot for installing one of these small, high performance drives. If you’re on an older build or want to save $20-$50 while giving up some performance, check out the standard SATA SSDs in our Best SSD for gaming guide.
The good news is that prices are starting to come down, and we’ve added Adata’s budget friendly SX7000 to our list of tested drives. It’s not the fastest NVMe drive around, but it is the cheapest NVMe model so far, and it’s also faster (on the whole) than any SATA drive. That’s not the only recent addition, as we’ve also tested Intel’s SSD 760p, and there are more NVMe drives slated to launch in the coming months.
Another bit of good news is that the upward trending prices in SSDs due to the NAND shortage are starting to come down. That’s not to say we’ve reached similar lows as before, but prices are lower than last month, and we’re optimistic that this trend will continue.
Which are the best NVMe SSDs? We’ve picked the best overall choice, a budget-friendly option, and the highest performance drive to satisfy your NVMe dreams.
Best NVMe SSD
- Excellent performance, not prone to throttling
- Good price per GB for NVMe
- Available in capacities up to 1TB
- Costs 50 percent more than a SATA SSD
Samsung was first on the scene with M.2 NVMe drives, and it still dominates the market. With its most recent launch of the 960 Pro and 960 Evo, performance improves over the previous generation, and prices are starting to drop as well. For most PCs, including those running lighter storage workloads like gaming, Samsung’s much more affordable 960 Evo is the NVMe drive to get. The 960 Evo 500GB has read/write speeds of up to 3,200/1,800 MB/s, and can do up to 330k IOPS (only 14k/50k IOPS at queue depth 1, however).
The 960 Evo uses Samsung’s new Polaris controller, which has five ARM cores compared to the three ARM cores in the 950’s UBX controller. One of the cores is used for communicating with the host system in both controllers, meaning Polaris can dedicate far more resources to accessing data. Having more cores also means the clockspeed on each core can be lower, improving temperatures under sustained workloads, and the drive design has been tweaked in other ways to avoid throttling. The 960 Evo lineup also uses Samsung’s latest iteration of V-NAND (aka 3D NAND), with 48-layer 256Gb die.
What does all of this mean in the real world? The 960 Evo 500GB that we tested is among the fastest SSDs in the world, and the only options to improve performance cost over 50 percent more per GB. If price per GB is at all a factor in your storage considerations, and it should be, there’s not much point in going beyond the Samsung 960 Evo.
The more important question isn’t whether the 960 Evo is fast, it’s whether you actually need or will benefit from having such a fast SSD. Servers running complex databases and other enterprise workloads might benefit from further improvements in storage performance, but for most desktop PCs and notebooks, even the 960 Evo is overkill.
The 960 Evo 500GB costs about 50 percent more than our recommended best SATA SSD, the Crucial MX500 500GB, and in storage-focused testing it delivers more than twice the performance. But the difference in time for booting Windows 10 or launching your favorite game is often less than a second.
The global NAND shortage is starting to abate, and Samsung has the benefit of controlling production of the V-NAND used in its drives. The 960 Evo 500GB currently costs around $200 / £200, down about $50 from the launch price. That’s only 40 cents per GB, which is great for one of the fastest NVMe drives, but the best SATA SSDs go for around 25 cents per GB.
source: pcgamer
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