Which SSD is recommended?

In this day and age, any SSD is super fast that you will not be able to perceive the difference between SSD from brand A vs an SSD from brand B unless you ran synthetic benchmarks or you are dealing with very heavy workloads where every second matters. SSDs excel in their low access times which gives you that sensation of snappiness. Mind you, when SSD Manufacturers boast about a certain SSD's speed (ie. 7000 MB/s) that is only the sequential data metric which means when a user is working with huge files but in reality, the operating system and programs mostly comprise of smaller data files which work together which is also known as Random Read/Write speed which is usually between 40-80 MB so the difference is not that big between the low end SSDs vs the more expensive ones.

Users who deal with gigantic data sets such as large database files or video editors who deal with large videos will see a benefit from our premium SSDs as they have the best sequential and random data speeds.

Why don't we offer PCIe Gen 5 SSDs yet? Yes, they are the fastest SSDs we’ve seen to date, promising theoretical speeds of up to 32GT/s (gigatransfers per second) – that’s 100 percent faster than previous generation PCIe Gen 4 SSDs. And these beasts absolutely tear up the benchmark charts but there is a catch. These blazingly fast speeds are only in certain workloads, such as, transferring multiple GBs or TBs of large files (sequential data) but the reality is, we as regular or even power users or gamers deal with random data majority of the time (ie. multiple small or medium files). There is no difference between PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 SSDs when it comes to that performance metric, the performance is identical. For example, let's say you launch Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, to you the user, you think you just launched one program but in reality, many small files are loaded simultaneously that make up that program (ie. EXE files, DLLs, icons, etc.) so what you are dealing with is Random Data, not sequential data where the benefits of PCIe Gen 5 would come into play.

Another thing to keep in mind that PCIe Gen 5 SSDs tend to heat up more and when they reach a certain threshold, they would throttle down the speed meaning in the real world, you might actually get more real-world performance from a PCIe Gen 4 SSD than you would with a PCIe Gen 5 SSD.

In our testing, a 2TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD could load Counter-Strike: Go a mere 0.44 milliseconds faster than a 1TB PCIe Gen 4. In Cyberpunk 2077 the results were only slightly better, the quickest PCIe Gen 5 SSD finished the task just 1.06 seconds faster than the PCIe Gen 4 SSD tested.

This same principle also applies to PCIe Gen 4 vs Gen 3 SSDs. The Random read/write speeds have been the same anywhere between 60-80 MB/s Read and 250 MB/s write but SSD manufacturers want to always mention the maximum sequential speed of an SSD to make you think they're better.

To summarize, if you are a power user, enthusiast, or content creator and where budget is not a concern, choose a HIDevolution Approved Premium SSD as it will give you the best mix of performance dealing with small or large files. If budget is a concern, then our HIDevolution Approved Standard SSDs are fast enough and will provide most users with adequate performance.