Five things thousands of benchmark uploads taught us about SSDs

Drafted from every result uploaded to DiskBoard since November 2023. Cached results excluded; medians throughout.

1. One thread does not show what an NVMe drive can do

Almost everyone runs the DiskBoard test with the default single thread, and that is the right setting for comparing drives. But it is not the drive's ceiling. NVMe drives are built to serve many requests at once, and the test shows it:

The same population of drives roughly doubles its throughput between one thread and eight, and reaches two and a half times at 32. That is queue depth, and it is why a drive can score 7,000 MB/s on the box and 2,000 in a single-thread test without anything being wrong. If you want to see the box number, use the Threads setting.

2. Bigger drives are faster, not just bigger

Among NVMe drives, the median write speed climbs with capacity at every step: 916 MB/s under 300 GB, 1,406 at 300 to 600 GB, 2,185 around 1 TB, and 3,428 above 2.5 TB. The reason is physical. Capacity comes from more flash dies, and more dies can be written in parallel. When a laptop's 256 GB option is cheaper than the 1 TB option, part of what you are saving is speed.

3. BitLocker costs nothing you can measure

Windows drives that DiskBoard reports as encrypted and unlocked wrote at a median of 1,611 MB/s. Drives reporting no encryption wrote at 1,583. Modern CPUs encrypt faster than any consumer SSD can write, so the encryption is never the bottleneck. Leave it on.

4. A nearly full drive is a slightly slower drive

NVMe drives with less than 5 percent free space wrote at a median of 1,659 MB/s. Drives with more than half their space free wrote at 1,937. That is a 14 percent gap, and some of it is a confound: cheap drives fill up faster. But the direction matches how SSDs work. With little free space the controller has fewer empty blocks to write into and more housekeeping to do. It is not a reason to panic, only a reason not to run a drive at 98 percent for months.

5. PCIe 5 is still rare, and RAM is going the other way

The share of NVMe results reading above 5,000 MB/s, roughly the line between PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 class drives, went from 1.7 percent in late 2023 to 9.3 percent in late 2025, then eased to around 7 percent in 2026 as more mainstream users joined. NVMe as a share of all uploads went from 39 percent to about half.

The surprise is memory. In 2024 the most common amount of RAM on DiskBoard machines was 32 GB. In 2025 and 2026 it is 16 GB. As the user base has grown past enthusiasts, the typical machine has become more ordinary, which is also why the medians in these articles are a better guide to a normal PC than a review of a flagship drive on a test bench.

For the record: 71 percent of uploads come from Intel machines, 27 percent from AMD, and 1 percent from Apple silicon.

Bonus: the S.M.A.R.T. gap

Every internal NVMe and SATA drive on DiskBoard reported its health. A third of USB drives could not, because the USB bridge chip in the enclosure does not pass the commands through. If you keep anything important on an external drive, that is worth knowing before the drive tells you nothing right up to the day it fails.

Method

Sequential results only, cached results excluded as described in the article on 512 MB tests. Encryption status is as DiskBoard reads it from the volume. Free-space groups are by percentage of volume capacity at test time. Year trends use the half-year of the upload date.