Stefan Mileschin

As more SSD manufacturers introduce their inexpensive NVMe PCIe drives, the market of entry-level SSDs is slowly but surely moving away from SATA altogether. Case in point this week is GOODRAM, yet another SSD manufacturer who is launching a family of entry-level NVMe SSDs that are priced to compete with their SATA counterparts.

GOODRAM’s PX500-series SSDs are based on Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT controller and come with 256 GB, 512 GB, or 1 TB of usable 3D TLC NAND memory. The entry-level drives fully support modern SSD features like the NVMe 1.3a protocol, end-to-end data protection, L1.2 low power mode, and AES-256 encryption. What's also notable is that the manufacturer is specifically designing the M.2 2280 form-factor drives with laptop compatibility in mind; so rather than using a large metal heatsink, the drives are covered by a thin heat spreader made of plastic-like material so that they fit into the tight spaces afforded by laptops.

When it comes to performance, GOODRAM rates the new PX500-series SSDs for up to 2050 MB/s sequential read speeds, up to 1650 MB/s sequential write speeds, and up to 240,000/280,000 random read/write IOPS, which is in line with the capabilities of the controller and performance levels offered by competing drives.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15655...x500-nvme-ssds