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

First up is a look at the time to start-up various applications while encountering different I/O conditions in the background. To little surprise, the Samsung SM961 NVMe SSD was the fastest of these budget drives. The Silicon Power and PNY drives tended to be the fastest budget SATA drives tested while the Kingston A400 and Crucial BX500 drives tended to be slower for these startup time benchmarks.

With the basic SQLite benchmark for this popular embedded database library, the Samsung SM961 was much slower than the SATA drives tested. This is another Samsung drive we've seen exhibiting this odd (slow) behavior under SQLite. The Crucial BX500 driver meanwhile came out noticeably faster than the other drives for this test case.