If you’ve ever shopped for SSDs, then you know it can be a bit intimidating. Thankfully, some smart people went and ranked all the major SSDs available on the consumer market today using stats, science, and benchmark tests.
Which expensive SSD manufacturers are worth their money? Which cheap SSD manufacturers should be avoided?
Let’s find out.
How the Test Works
This test was performed by our friends over at TechSpot.com, so all credit goes to them.
The test involved 14 different SSDs from 9 different manufacturers. Those SSDs were all around 500GB (480GB to 512GB). They were also all priced between $190 and $550. Here are all the SSDs tested:
-Crucial BX100
-Crucial MX200
-G.Skill Phoenix Blade
-Intel SSD 750 Series
-Kingston HyperX Savage
-Kingston Predator
-OCZ Predator
-OCZ Vector 180
-Plextor PX-G512M6e
-Samsung SM951
-Samsung SSD 850 Evo
-Samsung SSD 850 Pro
-SanDisk Extreme Pro
-Transcend SSD370
-Transcend TS512GMTS800
The SSD benchmark tests were performed on a high-end system with an Intel Core i7-4770K, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a GTX 780. Here’s what TechSpot discovered.

File Copy Test

File copy tests measure how fast files can be copied onto the SSD. At the top end was the Samsung SM951 512GB, which isn’t much of a surprise.

One surprise on this test was that the cheaper SSDs like the Crucial MX200 was 32% slower than the SSD 850 Pro while only costing 13% less per GB.
The file copy test was repeated three times: once with a large compressed file, a game, and a program. Here’s how the other two tests came out:

 

What Did We Learn?

The Samsung SM951 is a really good SSD, reaching a peak speed of 790MB/s when copying game files. It’s also not the most expensive SSD on the list: it’s the third most expensive at $490.
The two most expensive SSDs are the G.Skill Phoenix Blade and Kingston Predator, which came in third and fourth place, respectively, in every copy test.
After those top 4 SSDs, the copy speeds dropped off sharply.
In any case, the read and write speeds advertised by SSD manufacturers aren’t the only two stats you should care about. The copy test gives you a more unbiased look at the expected performance of your SSD. That being said, the Samsung SM951 had the highest advertised read speeds (2150MB/s) and write speeds (1550MB/s).
At the cheaper end of the spectrum, there was little difference between the bottom 6-7 SSDs. These SSDs were all priced between $190 and $260, so there were no manufacturers trying to pass off low-quality SSDs for high price tags.
Once again, you can read the full SSD roundup here.