SABRENT M.2 NVMe SSD 8TB, Internal Solid State 3300 MB/s Read, PCIe 3.0 2280, M2 Hard Drive High Performance Compatible with PCs, NUCs Laptops, and Desktops (SB-RKTQ-8TB)

Product Information

Yes, faster drives will be released to the market near the end of the year, but for now, the T700's 12.4 / 11.8 GB/s of throughput leads the market, not to mention the beastly up to 1.5 million random read/write IOPS that remains uncontested by any SSD on the market. The Crucial T700 can take a beating, too: The T700 doesn't lose as much steam as other drives during heavy sustained workloads, making it a suitable drive for even the heaviest of workloads, like workstation-class video editing.

The device supports Trim, secure erase, and S.M.A.R.T. data reporting like most SSDs. It also has multiple power states to help save power in mobile devices. Intel is a known brand, and their SSDs are generally reliable, with a strong warranty and good support. However, this drive now falls under the Solidigm umbrella and has been succeeded by the PCIe 4.0 P41 Plus. That drive is DRAM-less and feels more like a side-grade, but has also been priced aggressively. However, if you don’t need the bit of extra bandwidth and would prefer a drive with DRAM, the 670p is a solid choice for a budget PCIe 3.0 SSD, especially for laptops. Software is another shopping consideration that only the storage nerds out there might dig into, but regardless of which company you go with, any SSD software management dashboard should have at least a secure erase option, a firmware update module, and some kind of migration tool that will let you safely and securely move data from one drive to another. Most mainstream drives will have you covered there.As more bits are stored within a cell, the more the performance suffers, and the endurance level of the drive will drop too. To negate the performance issue MLC, TLC, and QLC SSDs will apportion part of the drive to be used solely as SLC for a storage action, and then transfer data into the QLC part of the drive once it's not being used. While the PCIe 5.0 drives are the fastest SSDs money can buy right now, believe it or not, raw speed isn't everything. In regular productivity tasks such as web browsing or light desktop work, you may not even notice the difference between a PCIe 3.0 SSD and one with a 4.0 interface, let alone a new bleeding-edge PCIe 5.0 model. The latest PCIe 5.0 SSDs also carry a heavy price premium for now, so you're probably best suited with a PCIe 4.0 or 3.0 model — unless you're after the fastest possible performance money can buy, of course. If that's the case and your system supports it, go for a new PCIe 5.0 SSD.

Kioxia originally demonstrated the technical specifications for BiCS5 at ISSCC 2019. The original design was a 128-layer quad-plane design with a CMOS-under-Array (CuA) configuration. However, the BiCS we tested here is a 112-layer dual-plane design without CuA. These compromises suggest a bigger focus on production efficiency (density and yield), which explains the 1Tb dies used here. These characteristics have potentially impacted other drives by WD that have had their flash upgraded or replaced. U.2 is rare in consumer PCs; it's mostly made with enterprise customers in mind. A U.2 drive like the now-vintage Intel SSD 750 Series connects to a U.2 port on the motherboard via a special cable, or to a PCI Express M.2 slot using a special adapter. These drives almost always come in the 2.5-inch form factor. Unless you have a U.2 port on your desktop motherboard you want to use, you can ignore them. (And even if you do, you can still probably hook up an M.2 drive.)Sequential Read Up to 560 MB/s Sequential Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration

The SATA interface is capable of sequentially reading and writing a theoretical maximum of 600MBps in an ideal scenario, minus a bit for overhead processes. Most of our testing has shown that the average SATA drive tops out at roughly 500MBps to 550MBps; in sequential tasks, the real-world difference between the best SATA drive and a merely average one is pretty small. Controllers are a factor of SSD buying that only ultra-geeks will care about, but they're still important. The controller is a module on the SSD that essentially acts as the processor and traffic cop for the drive, translating the firmware instructions into features like error code correction (ECC) and SMART diagnostic tools, as well as modulating how well the SSD performs in general. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) The era of PCIe 5.0 SSDs is upon us, propelling us to new heights of stratospheric SSD performance. Blazing-fast PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, which offer up to twice the sequential speeds of the older PCIe 4.0 standard, are now supported with Intel and AMD's current platforms, the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 and 13th-Gen Raptor Lake. Then there's the difference between PCI Express generations. As you'd expect, drives speed up through each successive generation. PCIe 4.0 set peak-sequential speed records for consumer storage, and the first PCIe 5.0 drives have predictably blown these records away. PCIe 4.0 requires support from the specific desktop or laptop platform. PCIe 4.0 came to market with third- and fourth-generation Ryzen processors from AMD, and PCI Express 4.0 support is now available on the Intel side with Intel 500 Series chipset and later platforms with 11th to 14th Generation CPUs on the desktop. (It's also part of the company's mobile chip platforms from the 11th Generation onward. Indeed, the very latest desktop Intel platforms support the emerging PCIe 5.0 , whose system requirements are more onerous than PCIe 4.0.)Solid-state drives (SSDs) have come a long way in recent years: a long way up in speed and capacity, and a long way down in price. Crucial's T700 is the world's fastest SSD, taking the hands-down performance lead in every performance category. That groundbreaking speed comes courtesy of the drive's PCIe 5.0 x4 connection, which offers a pathway for up to twice the throughput of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and the Phison E26 SSD controller paired with Micron's leading-edge 232-Layer 3D TLC flash. That potent common creates an SSD that's the fastest on the market for PC game loading times. The 870 QVO’s write speed comes in at 530MB/s, while the read speed is set at a slightly higher 560MB/s. The write endurance of the SSD is rated at 2,880 TB, much higher than the QLC NVMe SSDs we saw earlier. The high capacity of the 870 QVO and its 2.5-inch form factor makes it the ideal choice for replacing your existing high-capacity hard drives, as the performance gains will be pretty significant than even the fastest ones. M.2 drives also come in different lengths. Physically, the most common of five M.2 SSD sizes is what's known as Type-2280, shorthand for 22 millimeters wide and 80mm long. (All SSDs you'll see for consumer PC upgrades are 22mm wide; lengths range from 30mm to 110mm.) Most are merely circuit boards with flash memory and controller chips on them, but some M.2 drives (especially those of the PCI Express 4.0 variety) now ship with relatively large heatsinks mounted on top to keep them cool, or in the box as accessories. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Random Read (4 KB, QD1) Up to 11,000 IOPS Random Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated Solid-state drives come in all shapes and sizes and are built for almost every purpose. Whether you need a drive whose first priority is dollar-savings, or one that will load up a 4K movie in less than half a second, there's an SSD made for the job. The Intel 670p is an older driver, but it is also a proven budget option that is often on steep sale. It’s best to grab it at 1TB or 2TB, as the 512GB model is slower with a smaller pSLC cache. The drive has DRAM, which is nice, and it has the fastest QLC on the market, even now. Performance outside of the cache does not suffer as much as a consequence. That said, while almost any SSD is much faster than any hard drive, not all SSDs are created equal—not by a long shot. SSD interfaces have evolved greatly over the last few years, and SSDs themselves are taking on different shapes and core technologies.

Plan Benefits

PCI Express 5.0 is the latest and by far the fastest. It offers substantial throughput increases, with maximum read and write speeds of up to 14,000MBps, effectively double those of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. Only the latest high-end desktops support this bus off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from scratch or perform a motherboard and CPU transplant on an existing desktop. Intel users will need a 12th or 13th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor on an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset. Note: The board must specifically have a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, too; not every board with chipset-level support does! (Also know: Laptops can't leverage the peak speeds of these drives, yet.) Going with anything less than 4TB with the 870 QVO will turn out to be a bad value as even TLC-based SATA SSDs without a powerful controller and DRAM cache will perform better in durability and transfer speeds. The main reason for QLC is that it makes 8TB a possibility and reduces the price-per-GB significantly to make it a worthwhile consideration. That said, those buying an SSD for professional applications such as filmmaking, server hosting, or anything else that involves large file transfers of the magnitude of hundreds of gigabytes daily will want to choose a drive that can withstand that kind of punishment for months, even years on end. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) That said, with games in popular series like Call of Duty requiring over 100GB of space just for one title, the drive could end up full again faster than you can line up a sniper shot. These days, if you're looking to get just one roomy drive (or maybe you have to, such as for a laptop), 2TB is the recommended size for gamers, while hardcore content creators who are dealing with 8K RAW footage will need far, far more. (A one-hour 8K RAW file will occupy 7.92 terabytes of space.) (Credit: Molly Flores) Even PCIe 3.0 is significantly faster than SATA in straight-up sequential tests, though. But that's just sequential speeds, and how fast a drive can copy a folder from one part of itself to another isn't all that matters these days. There's also the issue of capacity,