PSA: Benchmark & chart compares @ PCPP

[NobleGamer]

Looking to buy a storage drive? Want an easy way to compare how much faster or slower they actually are compared to each other? Suspicious of basic benchmarks on mainstream review sites with meaningless point scores?

 

Not long ago, PC Part Picker came up with a comprehensive storage testing methodology that and put their 100+ most popular SSD (and some HDD) drives through their testing.  Recently they added graphs of their test results, which can be used to compare multiple drives' performance when it comes to sequential or random read/write performance. Viewing details of a specific drive with a benchmark will show its benchmark ranking relative to other tested drives. No account required to compare drives & such, but if you do its a great way to manage build part lists.

 

Benefits to these benchmarks:

• Gives read/write speeds over  short & long time periods to see when cache runs out or inconsistent performance happens. Beneficial for simulating file copy/move and...
• Random throughput performance matters for OS booting and games/apps with many or small files that are loaded from SSD to memory or GPU
• These tests are OS agnostic - So there is no interference from the OS-specific handling of the SSD, such as when TRIM is performed

 

I hope this is helpful for people who are more discerning about the performance of drives they purchase. For example, I know it was helpful to me when I was looking for a budget SSD that I want to ensure doesn't have totally weak random reads/writes compared to other budget drives.

 

Some obligatory caveats to this, or really any benchmarks:

• Beyond a certain point with SSDs, h read & write speeds hardly matter when it comes to gaming, unless a game requires many random read/writes
• Sequential & random benchmark speeds don't necessarily directly translate to real world performance with OS overhead, etc. PCPP did tests without installing an OS on the drives they test, which removes some such overhead & variables
• Some manufacturers have or can change the drive hardware (controllers, etc) without changing the model number, which can impact performance between different drives of the same model

Edited November 3, 2023 by NobleGamer
Provided why this is beneficial

[IkeaGnome]

There's also one on Techpowerup with more than 1200 drives.

https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/

Good to see more companies doing this, but it's going to be a while before PCPP catches up with the TPU database.

[NobleGamer]

4 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

There's also one on Techpowerup with more than 1200 drives.

https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/

Good to see more companies doing this, but it's going to be a while before PCPP catches up with the TPU database.

Its useful, though doesn't seem to have benchmarks - It has hardware & tech specs beyond what retailers typically provide, and warns if a drive has different hardware/controllers for the same model. The speeds & IOPS listed on techpowerup are provided by the manufacturer, and are not based on independent benchmarks.

[GabrielFerrazTPU]

On 12/23/2022 at 6:56 PM, NobleGamer said:

Its useful, though doesn't seem to have benchmarks - It has hardware & tech specs beyond what retailers typically provide, and warns if a drive has different hardware/controllers for the same model. The speeds & IOPS listed on techpowerup are provided by the manufacturer, and are not based on independent benchmarks.

Yes, thats true because unfortunately we can't make a performance graph like we have for GPUs since its way easier to test GPUs and see a performance difference, but with SSDs its way harder, and even testing with different hardware there is a big performance difference, so in order to have a relative performance, the best case scenarios would be to find a website or reviewer that had tested the 1200+ SSDs that I have added to the database.

People ask me a lot to make a tierlist as well, but thats very difficult if you understand how storage works, because the smallest things can make a high end SSD perform a little worst in some scenarios agains the second fastest SSD for example.