HWM+HardwareZone.com Tech Awards 2017: Editor's Choice - Part 2
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Best Solid State Drive
Best Solid State Drive
2016 is possibly the year where we can say that SSDs have truly gone mainstream. Once, they used to be the playthings of the rich and power-crazed, but now, thanks to falling SSD prices, no system manufacturer would want to be caught offering a product without some form of flash storage in them.
But if you want the absolute best in flash storage, you need to have a PCIe-based SSD. And 2016 was the year SSD manufacturers got serious about PCIe-based SSDs. This year saw all the big names jump on the PCIe SSD bandwagon, offering products supporting the fast PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and the new NVMe protocol. As a result, these new SSDs are blazing fast and are many times quicker than your standard SATA-based SSDs.
To make the cut, the SSD must support the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, NVMe protocol, and must be released in 2016.
Nominees:
- ADATA XPG SX8000
- Plextor M8Pe
- OCZ RD400
- Samsung SSD 960 Pro
And the winner is...
For the past couple of years, Samsung has offered drives with very high performance and cost ratio and the new SSD 960 Pro continues this tradition. While it may be one of the priciest PCIe-based SSDs, its performance is nearly unbeatable.
Much of this has to do with Samsung’s new Polaris controller, a penta-core beast which allows the SSD 960 Pro to hit speeds that we have never seen before in a consumer PCIe-based SSD. The fact that Samsung develops and manufactures its own NAND chips and controller firmware also helps.
Performance aside, the SSD 960 Pro also benefits from Samsung’s Magician SSD management utility, very high endurance ratings, support for hardware encryption, and it even comes with a free data migration utility.
Criteria/Model | ADATA XPG SX8000 | Plextor M8Pe | OCZ RD400 | Samsung SSD 960 Pro |
---|---|---|---|---|
Performance | 7.0 | 8.0 | 8.5 | 9.0 |
Features | 8.5 | 8.5 | 8.5 | 8.5 |
Value | 8.0 | 9.0 | 7.5 (adjusted down from 9.0) |
8.5 (adjusted down from 9.5) |
Overall | 7.5 | 8.5 | 8.0 (adjusted down from 8.5) |
9.0 |
Price | S$349 | S$377 | S$509 | S$459 |
*Note: Prices and ratings listed are accurate at the time of evaluation.
For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed at the References section at the end.
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