The fastest SSDs in real computers, ranked by DiskBoard users
Drafted from every result uploaded to DiskBoard since November 2023, covering more than two thousand drive models. Method notes at the end.
Review sites test one drive, in one machine, on one day. DiskBoard users test the drive they own, in the computer they use, with whatever motherboard, cable, driver and background load they actually have. The numbers below are the middle of that spread, not the best case, which makes them a better guide to what you will see after you install the drive.
The ranking
Single-thread sequential test, 512 MB file, 1 MB buffer, which is the DiskBoard default and what 93 percent of users ran. Only drives with at least eight results are listed, and results that exceed the physical limit of the bus or show a read-to-write ratio above 3 are excluded (see the method notes). Speeds are medians in MB/s.
| # | Drive | Results | Read | Write |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Crucial T705 4TB | 31 | 7,346 | 7,233 |
| 2 | Samsung 9100 PRO 1TB | 9 | 6,959 | 5,543 |
| 3 | Samsung 9100 PRO 4TB | 12 | 6,758 | 6,432 |
| 4 | Crucial T500 1TB | 12 | 6,485 | 3,551 |
| 5 | Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB | 12 | 6,141 | 6,506 |
| 6 | Crucial P510 2TB | 10 | 5,409 | 5,659 |
| 7 | SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB | 13 | 4,981 | 3,933 |
| 8 | Lexar EQ790 1TB | 13 | 4,508 | 4,174 |
| 9 | Patriot Viper VP4300L 4TB | 9 | 4,398 | 3,814 |
| 10 | Lexar NM790 4TB | 11 | 4,173 | 3,321 |
| 11 | WD Black SN850X 1TB | 140 | 4,100 | 3,903 |
| 12 | WD Black SN850X 2TB | 13 | 4,087 | 3,502 |
Two things stand out.
The PCIe 5 drives are nowhere near their box numbers. The T705 is sold as a 14,100 MB/s drive and the 9100 PRO as 14,800 MB/s. In user machines, with a single thread, they land around 7,000. That is not the drives underperforming. A single-thread sequential test cannot keep a PCIe 5 controller busy, and many of these drives are sitting in PCIe 4 slots. When users ran the same drives with many threads, the picture changes: the 9100 PRO with Heatsink 2TB posted a median of 11,585 MB/s read across 18 mostly multi-threaded results, against 5,777 single-threaded. If you own one of these, run the DiskBoard test with 8 or more threads to see what it can do.
The best-value drive is not on the list. The WD Black SN850X 1TB has 140 results, more than any drive in the top ten combined, and its spread is narrow: 90 percent of users got between 2,615 and 4,427 MB/s write. A drive that reliably delivers what it promises, in almost any machine, is a different kind of fast.
The drives people actually own
Ranked by how many users tested them, not by speed:
| Drive | Results | Read | Write | 10th to 90th percentile read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crucial P3 2TB | 498 | 2,161 | 2,118 | 1,843 to 4,256 |
| WD Black SN850X 1TB | 154 | 4,101 | 3,907 | 3,612 to 4,425 |
| Crucial P3 Plus 500GB | 149 | 2,606 | 1,779 | 1,938 to 2,659 |
| Kingston OM8PDP3512B (OEM) | 112 | 1,695 | 1,100 | 1,650 to 1,715 |
| Lexar NM790 1TB | 107 | 3,037 | 2,516 | 2,747 to 4,925 |
| Lexar NM790 2TB | 90 | 4,597 | 4,329 | 3,592 to 6,619 |
The Crucial P3 2TB is the most benchmarked drive on DiskBoard by a wide margin, and it is a PCIe 3 drive rated at 3,500 MB/s. Its 90th-percentile read of 4,256 MB/s is above what a PCIe 3 x4 slot can carry, which means about one user in ten had a RAM cache in front of it, most likely Crucial's own Momentum Cache. More on that in the article about cache.
Method
- Source: all DiskBoard uploads at the time of writing. Every result is one run of the DiskBoard benchmark, averaged over its iterations (five by default).
- Ranking uses sequential results with one thread only, so drives are compared under the same load.
- Excluded: results whose read speed exceeds the physical limit of the bus (600 MB/s for SATA, 15,000 MB/s for NVMe) or whose read is more than three times the write, which is the signature of a RAM cache rather than a drive. That removed 4.4 percent of NVMe results.
- Medians, not averages, so a few cached or throttled runs do not move the number.
- Drives with fewer than eight results are not ranked. Model names are shown as DiskBoard reads them from the drive, with the retail name added where it is unambiguous.