PC storage has advanced in exciting new directions in recent years. PC users now have a wide range of options from standard SATA SSDs and hybrid drives to the latest PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage devices and new technologies like Intel's Optane.
Unfortunately, many of the tools for measuring storage performance were developed when HDDs were the most common type of drive. And results from synthetic benchmarks can be hard to relate to real-world performance.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark is a dedicated component test that measures the gaming performance of the fastest modern PC storage hardware. It supports all the latest storage technologies and focuses on practical, real-world gaming performance.
This benchmark is for consumers and professional users in the media looking for superior tools to test and compare the gaming performance of the latest internal and external storage devices for desktop and laptop PCs.
The expected useful life of some storage devices is based on the number of write-erase cycles they perform. Running storage benchmarks repeatedly may shorten the lifetime of some drives.