The Big Gen4 SSD Roundup - Best SSDs for PC & Playstation 5 in 2022

hey everyone nada here and today i'm going to take a look at 15 different gen 4 nvme ssds that i have right here because there are actually so many of these on the market and it can be difficult and quite a bit overwhelming to choose the right one especially when they're all being sold as super fast gen 4 drives while being vastly different in terms of performance and in terms of pricing and while there are some pretty good ones that are definitely worth getting there are also some models out there that are actually far behind and should be avoided so if you're looking to get a new gen 4 ssd for your pc or for your playstation for example this video is for you but first this video is brought to you by seasonic and their prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they are whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test rigs and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below let's start with some general information that applies to all of these drives like thermals for example now high performance nvme ssds get hot and will end up throttling if you stress them for long enough so you should always have adequate cooling for your drives and many of these drives as you can see come with a heatsink and heatsinks have become pretty standard on most recent motherboards but if your motherboard doesn't have it for some reason you can actually just grab a decent heatsink from amazon for example for about 10 or so and that will be completely enough so you shouldn't stress about thermals but you should definitely make sure that your drive has some cooling going on another very important thing to know is that the capacity of the drive can impact its performance so smaller capacities like 256 or 512 gigabytes will usually struggle to keep up with the larger ones but once you look at one terabyte and up that is no longer a concern so if you're going for a smaller capacity the performance numbers will not actually be the same as the larger ones i have in my graphs and do keep in mind the smaller ssds usually have a much worse price per gigabyte ratio now that ssds have become pretty cheap so i personally find it very hard to recommend the lower capacity drives at all so unless you have a very good reason to buy a small ssd my advice is to just go for one terabyte or larger because that is where you hit that best performance peak and a good value ratio even if that means skipping gen 4 and getting a large gen 3 drive but i'm actually not going to go into gen 4 versus gen 3 today this video is just for people that specifically want gen 4 drives anyway uh let's go over my test trick that i used to test all these drives on now i have the asus rg maximus z690 hero motherboard with an intel core i9 12900k corsair ddr5 memory and i slapped a low rpm scythe fan on top to give a little bit of an airflow to the motherboard and the ssds that are being tested as always this is powered with seasonic prime power supply and for the operating system i went with windows 11. now you shouldn't expect the results to change all that much with windows 10 or an amd cpu but it can vary a bit so keep that in mind and if an ssd came with a heatsink i was using that one and for the ones that don't have a heatsink included i was using the one on the motherboard itself now i did not count the thin metal sticker that is supposed to spread the heat as a heatsink i just counted the proper ones right and right away we can get rid of two drives of these 15 because of their extremely weak performance now to make it clear i don't really expect cheap ssds to offer the best performance but both the xpg s50 lite and the transcend 240s showed really problematic performance in small block read and write tests and that is something that a lot of the regular everyday tasks rely on so i'm not gonna talk about these two anymore because uh even if they might be really cheap there are plenty of other drives that cost the same or even less that do not have such an issue so those two are out and then i'm going to split the 13 i have left into several groups to make this big comparison a bit easier for everyone so let's start with the absolute fastest gen 4 ssds you can buy as usual i like to rely on the pc mark storage benchmarks because they make it very easy to point out which drives are good for which sort of use cases and the pc mark 10 quick test is a very nice and light test that replicates many of the basic things we do with our pcs like loading applications for example like working in documents like playing games and so on and even though you don't really need a super high-end drive for this kind of use you would expect the best ssds to also be great at these light tasks right and here the western digital black sn850 and the kingston kc 3000 are at the very top but no less than eight of the other drives are not that far behind the full pc mark 10 suite is a much more intense test that replicates a more of an active use of the drive and this is more aimed at people who really rely on their storage a bit more like for video editors for example or when you're looking to get a main drive for your pc now the ranking does shift a little bit here with both the fire cuda 530 and the samsung 980 pro going up a few spots but again is the western digital black sn850 and the kingston kc3000 that really stand out the most and now let's look at the consistency test which is an extremely heavy test that runs for several hours and includes rewriting the entire drive multiple times so it really puts the drive to work to almost an unrealistic amount and here it is the seagate fire cuda 530 that easily holds up the best leaving a big gap to the 980 pro which is in the second place and then followed by the same sn850 and the kc 3000 now gen 4 drives are heavily marketed with their sequential read and write speeds and while those numbers are of limited importance when it comes to real world use they can tell us which drives push the limits of the 7000 megabytes per second which is roughly the gen 4 specification and which don't and the same names as before are on the top of these graphs joined by the msi m480 and the aorus 7000s while some other drives are barely offering higher speeds than you would expect from gen 3 ssds so in my opinion and looking at these results if you're looking for a gen 4 ssd that offers the highest performance you should be looking at the western digital black sn850 the kingston kc 3000 the samsung 980 pro and the seagate fire cuda 530 and then choosing between those will really depend on your personal needs so if you expect to really stress your ssd without any breaks for whatever reason i would say the fire cuda is the way to go plus it is available in a four terabyte version as well so for anyone looking for a lot of storage this makes a lot of sense the 980 pro is a bit more consistent with its performance throughout multiple benchmarks though plus offers full hardware-based encryption which the other drives do not also samsung drives tend to be on some kind of a discount all the time so there is something to be said about that as well but the sna 50 and the kc 3000 are still the fastest drives for most regular users between those two the s 850 tends to be cheaper in most parts of the world and is probably the first option that you should look at here in the eu it often costs just a little bit more than budget gen 4 drives or even sata drives for that matter but prices these days are very unstable as you already know so make sure that you check and compare prices in your region before making any decisions about anything really so let's talk about the gen 4 drives that offer a lot of value and this is a bit more difficult because prices do change so much all the time and they also vary wildly per region and when it's all about value even a small price change can shift the whole balance completely now for my value recommendations today i'm gonna look at eu and u.s prices from the last week but if you're watching this in the future again make sure you check the recent pricing in your region now let's look at the eu pricing first surprisingly enough most of the prices here haven't really changed in the last few weeks and that does make it easier to pick some winners and i would say western digital europe does it right here because sn850 is one of the fastest drives but also one of the more affordable gen 4 ssds in europe now given its performance and that price point it is pretty hard to recommend any drive that costs more than that this is one of the best drives to buy for a reasonable price but if you want to spend even less than that and you don't really need highest performance you have three options so the sabrent rocket 4 is a tiny bit cheaper but the price difference isn't enough to justify the performance difference we saw the rocket q4 is considerably cheaper but it's one of the few 4-bit drives which does hurt its performance and it also hurts its lifespan it is a lot slower in every benchmark and in my opinion not a very good buy for most users out there unless you're looking for a lot of storage because of that qlc memory it actually goes up to eight terabytes so if you only care about value and you also need a large capacity instead of speed the rocket q is a fair option the ss750se is the odd one out there i would say unlike the xpg and transcend it doesn't really have any real issues but it's really more of a gen 3 drive in a gen 4 package now the only thing going for it is the fact that it's often priced accordingly so that makes it somewhat forgivable but i personally wouldn't call it a gen 4 drive myself and nor consider it a great alternative when the much much better sn 850 isn't that much more expensive now looking at the u.s prices things are a bit different here so the s 850 is still offering a good price to performance ratio but there are several ssds that can actually save you a significant amount of money now the most interesting drive here is the rocket nvme four so not the qlc one but the regular three bit mlc drive uh that currently costs 129 for one terabyte and a week earlier it was only 110 and i would say while it's not topping the charts in terms of performance it does perform consistently well uh without any real flaws to worry about and when you're shopping for a good value ssd saving somewhere between 30 to 50 dollars per terabyte is a huge deal now of course you can still consider the rocket q uh and the sn750se for the same reasons i mentioned before but i think that the regular rocket nvme 4 offers the best price to performance ratio for people in the us now the next category i want to talk about is all the drives that fall in between so unlike with peripherals laptops or monitors there's not that much subjectivity when it comes to ssds they either have to perform really well or they have to have a great price or both there is very little room for anything else now i have a lot of drives that perform completely fine but they're either just outperformed or kind of made redundant because of their price and i would say the msi m480 and the aura 7000 s are the best examples of this they actually perform really great being just on the heels of the best performing drives i've tested so far but their current high price is what is keeping them from becoming a clear recommendation now the fire cuda 520 the regular auras drive and the patriot viper can all make perfect sense as well if their prices go down in the future until then they have to remain in this ssd limbo but how does this affect you if you're looking to buy an ssd for your playstation now for the most part the situation is more or less the same so the best ssds for pc are the better choice for playstation users as well but actually some things to consider so performance wise sony recommends that your ssd needs to read the data at at least 5 500 megabytes per second which technically disqualifies about half of the ssds in this list now i haven't really seen any performance issues if you ignore this spec game loading times are pretty much the same but i don't know how that will affect some future games and some future updates so i would personally just play it safe and just pick a drive that does score higher than 5500 megabytes per second keep in mind we're looking at the graphs you can skip the really long stress test results as the drives in your playstation will just read your game files that's pretty much it now you also need to think about the size of your heatsink because this space is obviously very limited now if we look at sony specs once again they state that the ssd plus heatsink can be no taller than 11.25 millimeters or the panel won't fit back on but there is actually a bit of room to work here so the aura 7000 s which is technically out of spec fits just fine but the msi m480 corsair mp600 and the regular sabrent heatsinks do not fit in a playstation so if you go for those or any other ssd that comes without a heatsink i would suggest you buy a low profile third-party heatsink that will cost you again about ten dollars and it will be just fine now the ps5 doesn't really stress your ssd that much so even a very slim heatsink will be enough to avoid thermal throttling i have a few suggestions actually so i'm gonna leave a few links in the description down below and you can check them out now this is all i have prepared for today now i know it's a bit of a mess when you try to compare 15 ssds so i do hope this video was clear enough and at least somewhat helpful and if you do have any questions just ask i will do my best to answer all of them also let me know in the comments down below what would you go for and if there are any ssds that you would like me to look at i would love to know your thoughts so thank you all for watching and see you in the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: Techtesters

Views: 307,245

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Id: Zy2HtI20eFQ

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022