TechPowerUp SSD of the Year

Lexar NM790

The best SSD on the block is Lexar NM790. We can't think of a greater success story in the storage industry than Lexar. This used to be a professional/creator focused brand under Micron Technology, mostly dealing in memory cards and flash drives, but has since been acquired by Longsys, which put it to great use for the entire catalog of client memory products, including memory modules, and SSDs, besides the removable flash storage products. The NM790 is a solidly put together drive that breaks the mold of controller+NAND flash combinations from the usual brands, and instead goes with Maxiotech's fastest Gen 4 NVMe controller, the MAP1602A; paired with 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash by YMTC, the company that has the incumbents spooked to the extent of erecting trade barriers against it. The 232-layer flash chip uses the company's second generation Xtracking 3D flash stacking and interconnect technology. The fingernail-sized Maxiotech controller is DRAMless, which makes this feat even more impressive.

The NM790 in its 4 TB variant that we tested with its PS5-friendly heatsink, crushed every test in our bench. We at TechPowerUp guide our readers to real-world storage benchmarks, and test in various sequential and random access tests of various queue depths. We also focus on sustained write performance, so we know that a drive's performance doesn't fall off a cliff after a small amount of continuous writes in a large file-transfer operation. The NM790 has great performance overall, despite a little spot here and there with synthetic random access tests. It's able to sustain its expected write performance over a vast 600 GB region, beyond which it drops to around 1.8 GB/s for the following 2 TB, and only begins to crawl beyond 2.5 TB, which goes to show that the drive is able to intelligently treat a large amount of its TLC NAND media as MLC (2 bits per cell), and even 275 GB of it as SLC.

As a tiny 12 nm DRAMless chip, the Maxiotech controller is a lot better behaved in terms of thermal throttling than competing solutions. As you'll see in our older reviews of the 2 TB and 4 TB variants of the NM790 without the heatsink, the added cooling is simply nice-to-have for PS5 compatibility, but isn't something you need. The real ace up Lexar's sleeve is pricing, and with $110 for the 2 TB variant, $210 for the 4 TB, and $50 extra for the heatsink (which you really don't need), these drives are very well priced.

TechPowerUp Hardware of 2023 Runner Up

Samsung 990 PRO

Since the first days of SSDs, Samsung enjoyed a front-row center market presence as a brand people recognize and can expect quality from. The Korean electronics giant produces every logic chip on the SSD, including controllers, NAND flash, and DRAM, and its flagship client SSDs have often been the fastest drives each generation. This is mainly because the company had clung onto MLC NAND flash as its flagship mainstay. Over the past couple of generations, however, the company has switched over to TLC NAND flash, since building a pure MLC drive in the 2 TB and 4 TB capacities isn't economical to remain competitive anymore. The 990 PRO uses Samsung's homebrew 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, with programming to treat the available user area as SLC until exhausted, and relegated to MLC, before TLC. The 990 PRO is Samsung's second attempt at a flagship Gen 4 NVMe SSD after the 980 PRO.

The 990 PRO offers among the best performance across synthetics and real-world benchmarks. It offers significant gains in sequential transfers over the 980 PRO, and is in the league of drives such as the Kingston KC3000 and XPG Gammix S70 Blade. The 990 PRO performs fairly well with real-world tests such as virtualization, file compression, game copy and read; large file transfers, unpacking/decryption, and application load times. It also fares among the top crust with game loading times. Thanks to its real world performance, the 990 PRO is the fastest Gen 4 SSD in our stock, beaten only by the Corsair MP700, which is a Gen 5 drive. It falls short in two areas—first, its SLC cache size is surprisingly small considering what Samsung could have done, with only 200 GB of the 2 TB drive being made to work as SLC (compare this to the 272 GB of our winner, which also stratifies some of its TLC as MLC. The other shortcoming of course is price. Samsung flagship drives were never known for good pricing, and with 2 TB being offered for $150, this drive is about $30-40 overpriced.

Notable Mentions

With SSDs, we focus squarely on the value proposition over which drive has a few extra MB/s in CrystalDiskMark, and although QLC NAND flash seemed off-putting in the beginning, the technology is beginning to grow on us. The HP FX700 is one such drive. Much like the NM790, it is based on a DRAMless Maxiotech platform, but uses 232-layer QLC NAND flash from YMTC. It's amazing how contemporary YMTC-based SSDs are, and a real loss to the consumer that YMTC doesn't have a level playing field in the ICT industry. The FX700 will put some TLC-based drives to shame in terms of write performance (considering writes on the QLC media are slower).

The Crucial T700 Pro 4 TB is a fantastic PCIe Gen 5 SSD that quite literally pushes over 9000 MB/s under ideal conditions (sequential, low queue-depth). It combines a popular Phison E26 controller with Micron's latest 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, and 8 GB of its fastest DDR4-4266 memory. The drive is squarely in the Gen 5 era, where it makes its heft felt in large sequential file-transfers, although it's not the fastest drive in some of the latency-sensitive workloads that aren't pushing too much data. Gen 5 SSDs still bear some early-adopter tax, and we'll have to wait another year until they're affordable.