Goodram PX700 2TB SSD Review: High-end punch on a budget core

Comparison Products

The Goodram PX700 is in a tight spot with ample competition in today’s market. This has been true for some years now, but some more recent releases have turned up the heat. These would include the Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 with its fantastic random read latency, the Crucial P310 with surprisingly good all-around performance, and even the Samsung 990, which was a very late arrival. Existing drives with comparable hardware to the PX700 include the Acer FA200 with QLC flash plus the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, Addlink A93, and Inland TN470 with TLC. The last of these also uses a Phison controller rather than the more common Maxio MAP1602. Lastly, we have the budget-minded Kingston NV3, which is always looming in the background.

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.

Image 1 of 3

The PX700’s 3DMark results are spot-on for a drive of this caliber, hanging out at around 40µs for latency with bandwidth over 700 MB/s. This level of performance is excellent for gaming, and the only drive that wouldn’t fall into that category is the NV3. The NV3 is still fast enough for a games drive and remains a good budget choice, but there are faster options like the PX700. We want to emphasize that the PX700 is better than it looks in this lineup because it’s effectively within range of all drives but one, the WD Blue SN5100.

Among the QLC-based drives, the WD Blue SN5100, 990, and P310 all notably score near the top. The BiCS flash in the first drive is known for its responsiveness and, yes, it will give you a small edge with game load times. However, the 990 is right up there with the P310, which means there is no shortage of viable options. Most slower drives, from a gamer’s perspective, will be last-generation or slower PCIe 4.0, which means it’s not hard to find drives that are very fast for games. This means that the deciding factor might lie outside of 3DMark performance, such as drive reliability.

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.

Image 1 of 3

While the PX700 is merely mediocre against the competition in 3DMark – its absolute performance is quite good, though – its showing in PCMark 10 is better. This is again a scenario where the drives with TLC flash, including the TN470 with Phison’s controller, are underwhelming. This can be confusing to buyers who have relied on the mantra that TLC is better than QLC. There are reasons for the surprise here, although the general idea that benchmarking is often looking at ideal scenarios is perhaps the easiest answer.

These drives, whether TLC or QLC, rely on pSLC cache as much as possible to give you the best performance. This pSLC mode is not equivalent to native pSLC and is generally the same speed regardless of the flash type. QLC, however, tends to lead TLC in some ways and follow it in others. For example, QLC gets larger benefits from optimizations, so it may see advanced techniques first. This includes improvements to 4K latency. On the other hand, QLC has four planes when TLC has advanced to six. As we’ve seen with BiCS flash, which is four-plane against six-plane TLC from Micron and YMTC, fewer planes can lead to lower effective latency. The advantage of a higher plane count is in bandwidth but does not come without costs and drawbacks.

The PX700 is also faster than a QLC-based drive with the same controller, like the FA200. In that case, the FA200 uses twice as many dies – thirty-two – which puts more load on the controller. This can increase latency. In general, the idea has been that bigger drives are faster, which is certainly true in many cases. Larger drives will have more bandwidth and can reach higher IOPS due to improved parallelization. However, past four dies for each channel – this is where the PX700 falls, and the FA200 exceeds – you are increasing power consumption and overhead. So, the PX700 is in a sweet spot for how this benchmark tests.

We would go on to say that the P310, WD Blue SN5100, and 990 all beat the PX700. These are all QLC-based drives with a range of controllers. We’ve already explained the BiCS factor. Samsung’s newer QLC is also very good. The P310 has always been a bit of an outlier, as on paper its hardware shouldn’t perform as well as it does. Considering Crucial used to rely at least partially on proprietary controllers, we think this is a situation where they did a lot of optimization. WD and Sandisk also did this with the Black SN8100/Optimus Pro GX 8100 so there’s some “special sauce” at play. The PX700 being the best of the rest is a point in its favor, as those are the drives it’s competing with in the real market.

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.

Image 1 of 3

For the PS5, we can recommend almost any drive if it meets the PS5’s minimum requirements in any real way. The PX700 significantly exceeds that, so the question is more about value. What does this drive offer that others don’t? For this category, this often means leaning towards drives with heatsinks and/or higher reliability. Reliability is a difficult quality to measure, although a warranty gives some peace of mind. As for heatsinks, you can always add your own. So drawing lines here becomes more difficult.

We would point to our Power Consumption and Temperature section below for some additional support. The PX700, as we will see, runs coolly, which is a big positive for the PS5. Performance-wise, it’s right up there with the other drives and only really behind the Blue SN5100. You don’t have to go with a big brand to get good results here, and the PX700 will serve you well.

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.

Image 1 of 3

The PX700 does very well here, and we wanted to give some background on this test and what it means to put that into perspective. Whether you’re copying between drives or copying to and from the same drive, there are some universal principles. One is that there will be a bottleneck, and usually this will be on the write side of things, as drives write slower than they read. Flash memory, in particular, has to erase cells before they can be written again, which leads to some curious behavior under certain workloads. More generally, though, a write has higher latency – with flash again, this is due to the technology and how multi-bit cells usually need multiple write passes – and writes must be acknowledged, while reads just come from usually static media.

If you have drives that are of different classes – NVMe and SATA, or PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 – then you would expect the slower class of drive to be the bottleneck even if it’s on the read side. This is also universal, going back to the days when HDDs got faster as they got bigger. SSDs also generally get faster with capacity, but flash is so fast that these rules are no longer absolute. This is complicated by other facets of the technology like pSLC caching and TLC versus QLC flash, where with sustained writes you can have dramatic changes in performance. This is a problem because many people buy drives thinking mostly about transfer performance, and when they hit a low that’s nowhere near the box-rated speed, they panic.

Our DiskBench testing takes all of this into account as it’s closer to a real-world workload, including using different file sizes. Transferring a bunch of large files is fast. Copying lots of small files – and any veteran of hard drives will know this from backing up Windows or documents manually – can be very slow, even on SSDs. So we do a mix. Moreover, we’re doing an on-drive copy, which helps rule out external factors. Much of what you do on your system can be cached in system memory, which can give misleading metrics depending on what you’re doing.

What we’re leading up to here is that the PX700 is the fastest drive on the list for reads and not far off first place for copying. Considering it’s up against some of the best budget drives out there, that’s no mean feat. This is, again, a real-world workload and probably more meaningful than something like 3DMark is for game load times.

Yes, the difference between the best and the worst drive for reads is under 10%, but nobody wants to buy a drive and feel bad about how fast it feels. The PX700 feels like a premium drive – the weaker write performance here is real, but most of what you’re doing will be read-heavy – and if you’re building a PC for someone with it over, say, the Samsung 990, they won’t know the difference. That is a common refrain regardless, but it helps underline the value of reliability. People buy Samsung and WD/Sandisk for a reason. Given Goodram’s European basis, there is some reason to celebrate the performance here while also acknowledging it’s not a no-name brand from AliExpress.

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.

Image 1 of 14

The PX700 has very steady performance in ATTO. We have no real complaints there. If we turn to sequential performance in CDM, we see more of the same. We would mostly look at QD1 reads for that, being a real-world metric, and it’s roughly on par with the NV7400 there. If we turn to random 4KB read performance at QD1, it’s a little bit further down the list but still hangs with excellent drives like the P310. Anything below about 45µs here is solid in our book. This drive should be quite responsive. If we were forced to be critical, we would point out that high QD 4KB write performance is low. Luckily, this is not a real-world workload for a drive of this type.

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 in order 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.

Image 1 of 3

The PX700 starts off in the pSLC cache mode, writing at 5.8 GB/s for over 86 seconds. Speeds are slightly higher for the first two seconds, something we have seen before with this controller, but ultimately we’re looking at a 500GB cache. This is Exhibit A of why we would identify the flash as QLC. 4-bit QLC flash operating in a 1-bit pSLC mode is trading four times the capacity for performance, which means a 2TB drive will generally have a 500GB cache at most. A 3-bit TLC drive could have a larger cache, although there is nothing precluding it from having 500GB, even if this seems hard to be coincidental.

A TLC drive with a smaller-than-maximum-sized cache would probably be able to maintain some speed, though. The PX700 immediately falls into a folding mode – it’s waiting for data to be moved from pSLC to the native flash – with an average speed of 163 MB/s. TLC flash can at times be this slow, but it’s less likely, and especially less likely if it has space to spare. Even the FA200, with the same hardware, is faster. The FA200 does have twice the flash, of course, but the controller is essentially saturated. Rather, the FA200’s cache speed of 5.54 GB/s is slower than the PX700’s – and this could be from having more flash – which means the post-cache speed will be higher. This reinforces the position that the drive is using QLC. Of course, we could have thrown the 2TB HP FX700 into the mix to further prove this point, but we think comparing a 4TB drive is a more valuable approach.

It goes without saying that this is the first real failing of the PX700 in our review. However, it’s expected of a QLC SSD with a massive cache. We don’t consider it disqualifying. You are not buying a budget SSD to hammer it with writes. On the other hand, the 600TBW per TB warranty makes you assume you could do that to some extent. Also, the lower performance here could creep up in a fuller-drive experience. We also can’t exclude the fact that some PX700s come with TLC flash. Which means, taken as a whole, you should assume QLC will perform like the TLC competition 99% of the time.

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 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.

Image 1 of 4

The PX700 comes back into our good graces with very good results in our power testing. It’s essentially tied for second with the FA200, which is hardly surprising given the hardware similarity. Only the BiCS8-based WD Blue SN5100 pulls away from the pack. We would consider every drive on this list to be sufficiently power-efficient for laptop use, although the 990 is closer to the lower end of that range. Certainly 550 MB/s per watt or higher is an excellent result and indicates a drive that can be run without a heatsink most comfortably. As for idle pull – we test under desktop conditions, which can also match poorly-optimized power settings – the PX700 is not unusually power-hungry and, in fact, better than the WD Blue SN5100. That’s a bonus.

Temperature-wise, we have good news. Goodram touts the graphene label on this drive, which, in our experience, does actually help with cooling, especially on a drive with four flash packages. The PX700 in our testing peaked at 61°C, nearly 30°C below the initial throttling point, well beyond the 20°C of headroom we like to see. The MAP1602 does tend to be a hotspot more than alternatives like the Phison E27T on the P310 and TN470, but a heat-spreading label does help. In our estimation, this is a cool-running drive that would be great anywhere.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and antivirus 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.

Goodram PX700 Bottom Line

The Goodram PX700 is a model budget PCIe 4.0 SSD. It matches or exceeds all of the expected performance points; it's power-efficient, and it uses a simple single-sided design without a heatsink. The only problem is that a “budget” drive has to be affordable. Current prices in the U.S. for this drive leave something to be desired. However, if it can match or beat the prices of other drives in this class, it’s probably one of the better choices available. In part, this is because we’d be liable to trust Goodram over non-names – the TBW alone shows it means business – and, on the other hand, the drive actually outperformed our expectations. Aside from the sustained write performance, this drive really feels premium. You don’t need a Samsung, WD, Sandisk, or even Crucial drive to feel like you have next-gen storage.

Let’s look at what we mean by that for your use. Game and app loading times are heavily reliant on random and sequential reads at low QD. The PX700 does well there. You also may be transferring files a lot, and the DiskBench results are mighty. For your laptop or HTPC, you might want something that’s power-efficient and, if space is a concern, something that stays cool without a heatsink, and this applies to PS5 use as well. The PX700 ran cool in our test with just the graphene label and was very efficient. You’re not getting a shorter warranty with lower TBW, as with Samsung’s 990 or some QLC-based drives, and we know where this drive is assembled. It’s hard to look at this combination and not feel like it’s a stellar drive if you can find it at a normal price.

Aside from price, our only complaint would be sustained write performance. It’s pretty dissapointing, although we should point out that it’s also expected. The drive also has trade-offs here. Namely, its standard pSLC write performance is better than the 4TB FA200, and in the 2TB HP FX700’s ballpark, so you’re not getting nothing for that later drop. The PX700, in fact, is faster folding than the FX700, too. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal, as you should never hit that state – this drive should effectively be fast enough for a 1GbE network, if that’s a bottleneck – and having a bit faster peak performance does translate to better marks on some of our benchmarks. The drive could take a hit in some cases, such as when it's very full, in which case getting a drive with DRAM and guaranteed TLC flash could assuage your fears.

For most use cases, though, the PX700 is more than good enough and, in fact, punches above its weight in our opinion. It would be a good option for just about any type of machine. PS5, laptop, HTPC, desktop, you name it. Primary or secondary drive, just fine. You don’t even need a heatsink. The capacity range is solid – you’re not going to find 8TB on a drive like this – and you can bring your own software. Performance is good enough to overlook any QLC flash use, so our main problem remains the price. Get it down to the same ballpark as the other drives in our list, and you have a contender. We hesitate to put an exact dollar amount for that because SSD prices are volatile, to say the least, so compare it to comparable drives such as the ones we matched it against today.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck