Not the fastest drive, but perhaps the most fascinating PCIe 3.0 option.
For systems that accept PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 drives, I’d recommend sticking with our usualgaming SSD recommendations, but for PCIe 3.0 systems this is a fascinating option that emphasises random performance against sequential speeds. I recorded some of the very fastest game load times with this drive when Itested it against other PCIe 3.0 options, and its random write speeds are competitive even with later generation PCIe 4.0 alternatives.
So what are those speeds? In terms of sequential reads/writes, we’re looking at a modest 2600MB/s and 2200MB/s respectively, which put this drive behind many of its PCIe 3.0 competitors. In terms of random speeds though, we’re looking at 575K IOPS and 550K IOPS for reads and writes respectively, much more competitive, and combined with some of the best latency figures ever recorded. That has a strong effect on real-world performance, and makes this drive worth considering even when it costs more than other PCIe 3.0 options for low-latency applications like programming.
