Disclaimer: These are not real benchmarks, these are some adhoc numbers for my personal amusement. These are the result of 1 run per drive on my machine, there was no attempt to do multiple runs or otherwise control for any variables.
SK Hynix P41 (ASUS Z790 CPU NVME)
This is considered the current top dog in the consumer NVME space. I’m certain that PCIe 5 versions will outperform it relatively soon, but it’s plenty fast at the start of 2023. SK Hynix advertises 7,000 MB/s sequential read and 6,500 MB/s sequential write; 1,200 TBW durability-wise.
WD SN850X (ASUS Z790 Chipset NVME)
This is the just-as-good or almost-as-good contender to the P41, depending on who you read. Western Digital advertises 7,300 MB/s sequential read and 6,350 MB/s sequential write.
Kinston NV2 (HP Z Turbo G2 M.2 PCIe Adapter)
One can compare the above two NVME cards, whereas this one is in a different class. I intentionally went bargain hunting, since the HP PCIe NVME adapter is going into a decade-old PC which only has a PCIe 2.0 slot available, so speeds will be limited by that interface rather than the NVME drive itself. Kingston advertises 3,500 MB/s sequential read speed. You can see that this drive does indeed have less raw throughput than those above, but - for random-access workloads - it’s really keeping up quite well.
