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Comparison Products
Given the current challenging consumer SSD market, we are selecting comparison drives carefully based on what’s available and what you might already have. We also try to make it a fair fight when possible, as not everybody needs to know what a $2,000 8TB drive can do against a budget option. For the GameStop NVMe SSD Card, we are breaking the competition down into roughly three segments.
Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark
Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.
The GameStop NVMe SSD is made for gaming, so we had to take it for a whirl in 3DMark. Performance is average, but considering the competition, this is a good result. 43µs for latency is spot-on for what we would expect for a drive in this category, and it will provide an excellent game-loading experience.
Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is an industry-standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.
PCMark 10 performance is surprisingly good, with the GameStop NVMe SSD beating the Black SN850X, a top-tier high-end drive. The Black SN7100 has newer flash than the Black SN850X and manages to beat it and the GameStop SSD. The 2TB 990 Pro that we are comparing here actually uses the same flash as the GameStop drive, but it’s able to pull ahead thanks to its more powerful controller and DRAM. The only real outlier is the P310, which is DRAM-less and QLC-based, but that drive was a late arrival with good optimization.
Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers
The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.
Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.
The GameStop NVMe SSD is built for the PS5, and it performs well here. It’s actually not super important for it to dominate here, but it is important that it doesn’t have weird performance quirks like the original Crucial T500. More relevant is the heatsink the drive comes with, which is PS5-compliant and keeps the drive from overheating. It looks good in the PS5, too, which is a side benefit.
Transfer Rates — DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.
DiskBench is a strange test because drives don’t always perform as we expect with it. We made it to test a real-world data transfer, and sometimes this reveals unexpected weaknesses. Usually, the copy speed will be capped by the write speed – write performance will be lower than read due to extra overhead – assuming the pSLC cache is large enough for the benchmark. Yet, we see here that the GameStop NVMe SSD with excellent write performance struggles with overall copy performance.
While this could be a symptom of using lower-grade flash as we contemplated above – if it’s designed to use different types of flash, an OEM might opt for more conservative write performance to protect endurance, or throttling, the latter, which we rule out with our testbed, it’s more likely the controller-flash combination. Samsung’s V8 flash is not super common in drives like this, and it’s even less common on SMI drives in our testing because so few use the SM2268XT2. However, SMI and its partners absolutely can and do use Samsung flash, so we don’t think this is a symptom of lesser hardware. Rather, it’s probably partly the controller – you can see where the NV3 ends up – and also partly a lack of “fit” with this particular flash. We will suss this out by checking its sustained write performance later in the review.
Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark
ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.
The GameStop NVMe SSD is okay, but not great in ATTO. This test can also show unexpected weaknesses in drives – the Black SN7100 comes to mind here – but generally follows a pattern of bandwidth potential. The NV3 struggles, for example. But even good drives like the 990 Pro are imperfect, and controller-flash combinations can act strangely here, as well. On the whole, we see no big problems with GameStop’s drive, but, in general, it is underperforming in comparison to other drives in its class, like the MP44.
We follow up with sequential testing in CDM to confirm or clarify ATTO’s results. CDM’s QD1 results give an idea of real-world transfer performance, and the GameStop SSD is weaker here, but it beats the QLC-based P310 and comes close to the 990 Pro for reads. This is good. For QD1, sequential writes are weaker. Writes are less important, but this matches what we saw in DiskBench’s copy performance result. Likewise, we see the drive coming in at ~43µs for QD1 random 4KB read latency, which aligns with 3DMark and PCMark. This metric is usually considered the most important for real-world feel. This result is very good, and its loss to the 990 Pro is largely due to the latter having DRAM.
Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache to free up space for further incoming data.
We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states, including the steady-state write performance.
The GameStop NVMe SSD first writes in the fast, single-bit pSLC cache mode at over 6.4 GB/s for 96 seconds. The cache is ~615GB, which is quite large – a 2TB, 3-bit TLC flash drive can have a cache upwards of 700GB – but does not use the full extent of the drive. We would say this is definitely consumer-leaning in its design, which means it’s designed to cache even very large writes in response to bursty workloads and even benchmarks. For a games-oriented drive, which is read-heavy, this is a good choice. While large writes for game installs will happen, most of the time, the user will be reading files. The drive can therefore assume that it doesn’t have to worry about getting enough idle time to move data from the cache over. This overall scheme – having a large write cache for expected read-heavy workloads – may sound contradictory, but it’s designed to hide the weakest performance states, and it accomplishes that for the most part. If you are gunning for a workspace drive that will see lots of drive writes, it’s less ideal.
If, for some reason, the cache is exhausted, the drive then writes in a direct-to-TLC mode, which has slower performance and can be harder on the flash. This SSD writes at ~825 MB/s in this mode, which is pretty close to our expectations. The 990 Pro, which has a controller with twice the flash channels, manages 1.4 GB/s in this mode. So, the GameStop SSD with the same flash is actually doing pretty well here, and there’s a reason for that. The 990 Pro has a smaller cache and levels off, while the GameStop SSD only puts off the inevitable folding state performance level.
Folding occurs when the drive runs out of free space and has to free more up by transferring data from the pSLC cache to the native TLC flash. In this mode, the GameStop SSD averages 542 MB/s, which is relatively slow, although above the maximum of SATA SSDs. If we look at its middle TLC state, we can see it almost matches the SN7100 and MP44’s steady state speed, so all in all, this is not too bad. You should never be reaching the worst-case folding state, and even if you exhaust the cache, the GameStop SSD has some runway at roughly competitive speeds. Its performance also suggests it’s using legitimate Samsung flash, so some worries can be quelled.
Power Consumption and Temperature
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.
Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.
For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.
If you’re looking for a good rule-of-thumb on efficiency for using an SSD in a laptop, around 500 MB/s per watt is a good place to start. This is exactly where the GameStop NVMe SSD falls. The eight-channel, DRAM-equipped 990 Pro and Black SN850X fall below this, and while these will work fine in many, if not most, laptops, they can throttle in others. The Black SN7100 is the pinnacle of efficiency for a laptop drive at the other edge. This leaves the GameStop SSD as somewhat borderline, although we think it will be just fine.
We did test the drive’s temperature during testing, and with the heatsink, it barely gets warm. This won’t overheat in any system if you use its heatsink. If it’s run bare, it might get closer to throttling in borderline environments – higher ambient temperatures, poor airflow, that sort of thing – but in general it is workable. We recommend using its heatsink, and it would be great in HTPCs, media systems, and even home labs in that configuration. It’s made to fit in the PS5, so it has fewer issues than some older heatsink designs. It should also work fine with motherboard M.2 covers and heatsinks.
Test Bench and Testing Notes
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Graphics | Intel Iris Xe UHD Graphics 770 |
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We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.
Seagate FireCuda 530R Bottom Line
An NVMe SSD from GameStop was not something we could say we ever expected. The company has had its ups, downs, and surprises in recent years, but we always welcome more storage. With this drive, it takes a page from Nextorage’s book by offering something tailor-made for the PS5 that is actually pretty good for other things, too. It’s power-efficient enough for laptops, its heatsink is quite capable for other systems, and performance on the whole is pretty good. It would be a solid upgrade from older PCIe 3.0 drives, and, at the time of review, it’s priced reasonably. We do have some concerns, but these are at least partially mitigated by our findings.
The first is that this drive has somewhat unusual hardware: an SMI SSD controller with Samsung flash. SMI makes great controllers, especially for consumer use in our experience, but has not been producing on the level of Phison in recent years. The SM2508 was a fantastic PCIe 5.0 surprise, and our early reports of SM2504XT-based drives suggest something impressive. The controller on this GameStope NVMe SSD, the SM2268XT2, remains lesser-known than the flagship SM2508, but it’s proven to be capable against the Phison E27T. We have no reason to distrust it. We also don’t usually see Samsung flash outside of Samsung drives, even though it’s not entirely uncommon to find it in some budget drives, but our testing indicates this flash is the real deal and is probably pretty robust. Performance is exactly what we’d expect, and this newer flash has had few problems on Samsung’s drives.
That leaves the question of the drive’s specifications and warranty. There is not much information to go on for this drive, which might enhance one’s anxiety. We have no reason to suspect this drive can’t hit the performance targets for its class – 1M IOPS, for one – and it’s surely backed for five years. Very few people are going to write enough for the standard TBW endurance in this drive class to matter, and there was a time when TBW wasn’t always listed because, frankly, it didn’t matter. That changed with Chia, but I digress.
Since this drive is geared towards gamers, we think there’s basically zero need for caution. While the hardware combination matches what we see from some generic brands, we feel this drive, on average, is probably a safe bet. It’s fine for upgrades and as a secondary drive, in addition to being good for primary use in most systems, so our recommendation is to grab one on sale while you can.
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