Our SSD benchmarks hierarchy provides a look at how all the different SSDs we’ve tested over the years stack up. These are all M.2 NVMe drives, but our test group has PCIe 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 models. This is not our list of the best SSDs, as we’re looking to rank the drives by raw performance, regardless of price — and when buying an SSD, the price per GB tends to be a major consideration.

We’ve grouped the SSDs by capacity and type to help keep things simple. There are tables for 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB+ as well as charts below. We also have a separate chart for all the M.2 2230 drives — for the best Steam Deck SSDs and other handhelds. Given current prices, not to mention the voracious appetite for the capacity of modern games, we’re going to start with the 2TB drives. These are generally the sweet spot in price-to-performance and capacity ratios, though there’s still a wide range in price — we’re looking at you, PCIe 5.0 drives.

We’ve sorted by the random QD1 IOPS results for the tables — the geometric mean of both the read and write IOPS, to be precise. This is one of the more realistic representations of overall SSD performance, even if it’s a synthetic test, as it’s difficult to game the system. Lots of manufacturers will test random IO performance at queue depths of 32 or even 256 because that makes everything look much faster, but in the real world, random queue depths are mostly at QD1 and almost never go beyond QD4.

Besides 4K IOPS, our tables also show the sequential performance (the geomean of the QD8 sequential read and write tests), file copy bandwidth (for a 50GB folder copy with over 30,000 files), average power consumption while copying those files, and finally a look at the geometric mean of all the read/write bandwidth tests. All of these metrics are also broken out into separate charts, should you prefer that format.

Also, if you’re an SSD manufacturer and you don’t see your drive in our tables, send me an email, and we can see about testing it. We can’t test every capacity of every drive out there, but we like to show a wide sampling of options.

2TB SSD Hierarchy

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