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

The PNY CS900 also had a slight lead in the CompileBench tests.

Not that you'd want to run a database server off a budget SSD in production, but if you are for a home server / development box or some other purpose, the Crucial BX500 actually yielded the best performance of these $35 and less drives.

If looking at the geometric mean of all the Linux storage benchmarks, the Samsung SM961 understandably was the fastest given it's an NVMe SSD going up against a bunch of Serial ATA SSDs, albeit it's one of the cheapest NVMe SSDs currently available in retail channels. Of the four $30 SATA SSDs tested, the PNY CS900 and Silicon Power A55 were the fastest while the Kingston A400 and Crucial BX500 were noticeably slower in our Linux benchmarks.