If a drive has its own heatsink, we test it with the sink in place. PCI Express 4.0 speedsters tend to generate a lot of heat. We use the same 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz, and the system employs an Nvidia GeForce RTX discrete graphics card, too. This more recent testbed uses an MSI Godlike X570 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU installed. This PC represents a state-of-the-art high-end desktop configuration, with an SSD boot drive as the primary drive and the drive being tested configured as supplemental storage.Īs a result, to test the speed potential of these drives, we needed a different testbed from our X299 build. We use 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz, and the system is using an Nvidia GeForce RTX discrete graphics card to power video. It is equipped with an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE processor clocked for a max boost frequency of 4.6GHz. This is a resolutely high-end PC circa 2020. These drives are tested on our main Windows-based storage testbed. PCIe 3.0-Based M.2 Internal SSDs Serial ATA 2.5-Inch or M.2 Drives SATA) and connection protocol (M.2 or 2.5-inch for internal SSDs USB or Thunderbolt for external SSDs), we test any drive that comes through the labs on a certain single testbed, or pair of testbeds, among three testbed systems. But SSDs have become so good these days that sometimes it's subtle things that separate an average drive from a winner.ĭepending on the bus architecture (PCI Express vs. We also evaluate drives on the basis of value for money and additional features, such as warranty, durability ratings, and supplementary software. Mind you, with SSDs, speed isn't everything. A mix of industry-standard tests, "trace-based" measures (more on what that means in a moment), and home-cooked trials, it runs each drive we review through a series of real-world and synthetic scenarios to help us determine which drives are the fastest, which are the slowest, and who falls in between. To make sure you always get the best bang for your storage buck, we here at PC Labs have developed an exhaustive testing suite. As long as you have the slots, ports, or bays necessary, the amount of movies, photos, and games you can shuttle onto or off of one machine is almost limitless. By installing a solid-state drive (SSD) in your desktop or laptop, you can drastically reduce the amount of time files, applications, and even operating systems take to load, install, or copy versus older platter-based hard drives. Upgrading your desktop or laptop to a solid-state storage solution-whether that's a traditional 2.5-inch drive or a cutting-edge M.2 one-is a quick, often inexpensive way of adding some much-needed performance to an aging system.
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