Performance
Performance has been tested on the AMD Ryzen platform, which features the Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, a Gigabyte X870E Pro ICE WiFi 7 motherboard, a Kingston FURY Renegade RGB 96GB DDR5-6400 CL32 memory kit, and a Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti graphics card. All tests were performed in a Windows 11 Pro x64 environment with the latest updates.
As usual, I will start with the ATTO Disk Benchmark. It’s one of the most popular storage benchmarks, and the results are easy to compare at home.
ATTO benchmark results are consistently slightly below the maximum specified values, and this is also the case for read bandwidth, which reaches up to 13.92 GB/s. The write bandwidth is up to 12.59 GB/s.
CrystalDiskMark shows us even higher bandwidth – nearly 14.5 GB/s read and over 13.4 GB/s write. This is already significantly more than we can see in the specifications.
Random bandwidth is also very high, exceeding two million IOPS for both read and write operations.
Let’s look at UL PCMark series benchmarks. In these tests, we can observe how the SSD performs in a mixed-load environment, which simulates a real-world workload.
The results in PCMark 10 are fantastic and clearly one of the best we have seen.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark is not the highest, but it is close to the best results we have registered. On the used test rig, the current limit is approximately 5,000 with the available SSDs. Considering the MARS 980 BLADE thermals, it’s impressive that it’s so efficient.
The Blackmagic storage benchmark focuses on decoding performance, giving us a different perspective.
The MARS 980 BLADE passes all tests without issues and is capable of decoding at all supported resolutions.
The final tests will include random read and write operations in the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark. These tests take approximately 21 minutes each on the MARS 980 BLADE SSD, which is comparable to the performance of competitive SSDs with the same controller.
Random read bandwidth reached an average of about 2.82GB/s, while random write bandwidth reached an average of as high as 2.01GB/s. Both results are relatively standard for the SM2508 controller.
The MARS 980 BLADE is one of the most efficient and best-performing SSDs we tested. It’s perfect for gaming and home entertainment. It’s also, so far, my favorite SSD with the SM2508 controller.
