Benchmarking Five ~$30 USD Solid-State Drives Under Ubuntu Linux

With falling memory prices, there's multiple solid-state drives available for around the $30 USD price point that offer 240~256GB capacities. Here are benchmarks of five such drives, four of which are SATA 3.0 SSDs and even one NVMe SSD. There are also comparison points to more premium SSD products.

The five budget SSDs being tested today include:

240GB PNY CS900 - A standard PNY Serial ATA SSD that retails for $29.99 USD and promises 535MB/s sequential reads and around 500MB/s sequential writes.

240GB KINGSTON SA400S3 - This Kingston A400 SSD in 240GB capacity also hits the $30 USD price point while promising 500MB/s reads and 450MB/s writes, sequential of course.

256GB SPCC - The Silicon Power A55 256GB SSD for $28 USD (SP256GBSS3A55S25).

240GB CT240BX500SSD1 - The Crucial BX500 240GB is also available retail at $29 USD from major Internet retailers and advertises up to 540MB/s read speeds with 500MB/s writes.

256GB SAMSUNG MZVPW256HEGL - The Samsung SM961 256GB is the only NVMe M.2 SSD being tested in today's comparison. This is also the most expensive: at some Internet retailers it is $40~50 USD still but at NewEgg I picked it up for $35 USD making it worthwhile to toss into this ~$30 SSD comparison.

All of these solid-state drives were tested on an Ubuntu 19.04 Intel Core i5 desktop running the Linux 5.0 kernel and all Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS mitigations to date. EXT4 was the file-system in use on each of these drives. Via the Phoronix Test Suite (https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/) a wide range of open-source Linux storage benchmarks were carried out.

Following the results from these five ~$30 SSDs are also results from some HDDs as well as higher-end SSDs for additional reference on the Linux desktop storage spectrum. Those other storage drives included the 1TB WD Black WD1003FZEX-0, 500GB WD Green WD5000AZRX-0, 500GB Samsung 860 EVO, and 250GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus.