Storage performance over the years

[Snakecharmed]

I started putting this together in my post in the recent purchase thread, but I decided to move it here.

 

I've benchmarked my storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, and SD cards since 2015 (and RAM since 2011) in CrystalDiskMark and saved the screenshots of the results. This is basically comparing higher-end HDDs, SSDs, and RAM disks from 2011 to now. The CrystalDiskMark tests changed from the older to the newer versions, so the only test results that are directly comparable are sequential reads and writes (first row).

 

I recently installed an 18 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro HDD for my main storage drive with the following results:

 

 

They aren't SSDs, but large capacity hard drives still perform respectably for storing lots of data. Just don't ever boot from them so you avoid the massive performance penalties for random reads. Mid-200s for sequential isn't bad for a non-system load. I remember back around 2010, hard drives would top out at around 110 MB/s sequential and the WD Raptors would top out at around 150-160. This was my oldest HDD benchmark in CrystalDiskMark on my 1.5 TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 from 2015:

 

 

When I built my Sandy Bridge system in 2011, I was one of the earlier adopters of SSDs as boot drives. It was still relatively new at the time that there was an SSD users club thread on OCN. Personally, I thought it was ridiculous that anyone could still defend HDDs as boot drives even back then, as if it was just okay that it took 3+ minutes for their PC to go from POST to a usable Windows desktop after the HDD stopped thrashing. There were some fervent holdouts though. To me, it wasn't even about storage capacity/cost ratio because I've had multiple drives in my system for almost as long as I can remember. It was about a life-changing experience as far as using PCs were concerned. This was my first SSD, a 128 GB Crucial m4:

 

 

Curiously enough, I never benched my current primary SSD until now, 1.5 years after installing it. This is the 1 TB WD_BLACK SN850X PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD benched right now under partial write loads because I don't really care about having a clean benchmark for this post. The read performance is pretty much on target (7300 MB/s) and even under load, the writes aren't exceedingly far from the rated sequential write performance (6300 MB/s):

 

 

I've also used RAM disks since the Sandy Bridge build as well, mostly for Photoshop scratch disks and temporary manual file copies of junk files I don't intend to keep. I started with Dataram RAMDisk on 16 GB Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3-1600 in 2011:

 

 

Changing the software from Dataram RAMDisk to SoftPerfect RAM Disk made a massive improvement with the exact same RAM. At this point, I increased my RAM disk size from 4 to 8 GB to serve as a before/after comparison of upgrading from 16 GB Corsair Vengeance to 32 GB Crucial Ballistix (both DDR3-1600 kits performed similarly). Anyway, this is my last benchmark of the Corsair in 2014 using SoftPerfect instead of Dataram:

 

 

And my current 64 GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 with SoftPerfect last year:

 

[neurotix]

Here's a Crucial T700 PCI-E 5.0 m.2

 

 

What I upgraded from, a Samsung 970 Evo PCI-E 3.0 m.2

 

 

And here is my fiancees 850 Evo SATA drive:

 

 

I have the Crucial T700 and now recently we rebuilt fiancee's rig to AM5 and she has the 970 Evo as a boot drive, I got it without paying attention at the time that PCI-E 4.0 drives were out and faster in 2019 and basically just bought it because it was Samsung without knowing when I first upgraded to Ryzen.

 

And there's even faster PCI-E 5.0 drives than my Crucial, approaching or passing 15GB/sec read.

 

It is definitely interesting to see the changes over the years.