Rating of the best SSD drives in 2022

It is quite common practice for manufacturers of solid state drives to change the hardware stuffing in models that are already on the market without advertising. Some of the “edits” being made are caused by an objective necessity, for example, the transition to memory chips made using more advanced technology, but in many cases there is a clear desire of companies to save money, which worsens the consumer qualities of disks. Mercantile considerations are not alien to the leadership of Crusial, but there is a nuance. At one time, their budget line BX500 fundamentally differed from the recommended MX500 only by the lack of a buffer. At the time of writing the review, the first one was “improved” with the help of QLC type memory, while the second received 96-layer TLC instead of 64-layer. As a result, when copying large volumes, the modern version of the BX500 noticeably sags in the speed of linear recording and small-block reading.

From the moment SanDisk came under the control of Western Digital, «WD» hard drives have been able to take a considerable share of the market. Including its budget segment, and the “budget” of WD Blue is immediately noticeable by the characteristics of the “stuffing”.

The controller used in this SSD is already well known to us — this is the good old Marvell 88SS1074, which has long been known for inexpensive solutions from the same Crucial or Kingston. In this drive, it is paired with 256 MB LDDR3-1866 RAM, the main disk space is 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND. The drive has a warranty resource of one hundred terabytes of recording, which, in general, has already crossed the threshold of obsolescence: under normal use (and it is unlikely that a budget 250-gigabyte drive will be bought for constant work with large data arrays), the user will upgrade the system faster than he can «Kill» a working SSD with a write.

True, it is worth remembering that this particular model failed in the 3DNews test, in which it withstood only 84 TBW out of the prescribed hundred, and this despite the fact that its cheaper «brother» WD Green was able to stretch more than three hundred. Of course, for a “home” drive, 84 TBW is decent (the author was not too lazy to check his own SSD — 14 TBW for two and a half years of work), and you can’t extrapolate the results of a particular drive to the entire series … but still, we’ll point this out. After 50 TBW, it probably makes sense to look at SMART to see how Reallocated Sectors Count is doing.

As we have already noted, for the average user, the optimal size of a solid state drive is now 500 gigabytes. Using the example of the WD Blue SATA SSD M.2 line, we will justify this statement from a technical point of view. Like many other SSDs available, these drives use a pseudo-SLC cache, which allows them to maintain the declared write speed for some time. Not very large, but directly dependent on their volume. In the case under consideration, the speed drop begins after writing 2 GB for a 250 GB model, a little more than 3 GB for a 500th SSD, and about 14 GB for a terabyte. It would seem that the larger the storage capacity, the better. Alas, not always. More precisely, not in the budget segment with its abundance of «weak links». Specifically, this is an insufficiently powerful controller that controls the recording process (four-channel Marvell 88SS1074). Simply put, the larger the WD Blue SATA drive, the deeper the speed drops after the cache is full.

Continuing our review of the best SSD drives 2021-2022 Silicon Power UD70. Silicon Power chose an alternative way to reduce the cost of NVMe drives and used chips with four-bit cells in the UD70 line. Yes, such memory is noticeably inferior to all its predecessors in the number of rewriting cycles, but for the average user with tasks such as surfing, social networking, watching videos or listening to music via the Internet, as well as with a rarely updated archive of all sorts of things, SSD based on 3D QLC NANS — this is really the best choice that allows you to do without an HDD and not overpay. Please note that the speeds declared by the manufacturer are achievable only in ideal conditions and for the older model. Judging by the reviews of the owners of the 500 GB drive, its performance is almost two times lower, although it still surpasses any SATA SSD records.

Another line of solid state drives, clearly proving the inexpediency of acquiring a minimum capacity SSD. It is possible that over time the manufacturer upgrades the youngest version of the P5, but so far it is equipped with memory chips of a non-optimal configuration, which is why it demonstrates half the speed in linear recording and a significant lag behind the older representatives of the series in small-block operations. Unfortunately, the developers considered it unnecessary to use any additional cooling options (at least in the form of a copper sticker), therefore, under load, the drives in question heat up and start throttling. The saddest thing is that in order to restore normal speed, you need not stop copying for a while, but cancel it. Simply put, the Crucial P5 is worth buying if the motherboard has a regular heatsink for the SSD or airflow is provided for the solid state drive.

The next reviewed SSD drive is not particularly impressive with its speed characteristics, but it allows you not to bother with the cooling system during installation, if a high workload is not expected. For example, a laptop or computer is not planned to be used for video editing. Thanks to the brand programmers who optimized the Kingston KC2500 firmware in order to give the SSD controller more time to “rest”. Moreover, the pseudo-SLC cache size in these drives depends not only on the remaining space, but also on other factors. In particular, on the type of data being written. Again, we draw your attention to the more modest performance of the younger version. If for the KC2500 with volumes of 500 GB and above, the linear write speed is declared at 2900 MB / s, then the least capacious SSD of this series, in principle, is not able to overcome the “bar” at around 1200 MB / s due to the inability to fully realize the potential of the controller.

And «gaming», and even «pro» … Marketing or a sign of real merit? For this SSD, sequential read / write speeds are declared at 3050/1200 MB / s, a 160-terabyte resource, and this is, in general, quite interesting.

The real speed characteristics of an SSD drive are good, but its weak point is also easily detected: when writing large amounts of data, the speed starts to sag, but when a considerable number of gigabytes are removed, the drive, all the more so, “presses the brake pedal”, it has too many resources takes away «internal service». For a system disk operating under heavy load, this is already fraught with serious friezes, which is unpleasant for a high-speed SSD, which is purchased to eliminate them. Moreover, in synthetic benchmarks, the drive is very good, but in some real scenarios it can show its not very pleasant side.

And what about the temperature regime? Here, external beauty is sacrificed for cooling efficiency: the drive is noticeably “hotter” than the same Patriot Memory VPN100. However, it is worth considering that its “playability” implies installation in a well-cooled case, so there should be no real problems with throttling in practice.

If you need an SSD specifically for fast system loading and «heavy» game levels, then ADATA will work for a solid «five». When working with large amounts of data, perhaps you should prefer a drive that is less fast “in absolute terms”, but more stable in speed and having a longer resource.

In last place in the category of mass NVMe drives is another model based on the Phison E12 controller. Unlike the Patriot Memory Viper VPN100 discussed above, the alleged development of Silicon Power cannot boast of either a powerful heatsink or circuitry features. Allegedly, because Phison most often supplies its partners with ready-made devices. P34A80 solid state drives are one of those and can be considered typical consumer-class solutions. The passport characteristics seem to be not bad, but the declared speeds are achievable only in scenarios with the maximum possible command queue (when reading) or when writing small portions of information (since the SLC cache of this device is static and small). For the 512 GB model, we are talking about a fast write of only 20 GB. It is worth noting that only versions with 256 and 512 GB on board are one-sided in this extensive family, i.e. older representatives of Silicon Power P34A80 are most likely unsuitable for installation in a laptop.

As mentioned above, in the 980 PRO line, the company used its achievements for server products, and this moment did not have the best effect on the new SSDs. The bottom line is that such specialization provides for the simultaneous maintenance of several dozen queues, which is typical for data center drives. At the same time, speed is not its strong point, which is bad for non-pipelinable small-block operations that prevail in user requests to the disk. In other words, you won’t see any of the benefits of PCI Express 4G unless you use Samsung 980 PRO drives for data-intensive tasks. As options, you can consider gaming application (fast loading of new locations) or professional video editing. Note that, yielding to their direct competitors from WD in performance, South Korean solid-state drives outperform them in the absence of friezes during background cleaning of “garbage”. Finally, there is a reason to once again point out the worst speed characteristics of the youngest model. If for the «five hundred» the maximum linear write speed of 5000 MB / s is declared, then for the MZ-V8P250BW this figure is much more modest — only 2700 MB / s.