Even though I feel like I’m doing everything right with the testbed setup, the fact that all of these drives hit a wall at around 7160 MB/s suggests a limitation somewhere. Perhaps this is the practical limit of a PCIe 4.0 x4 drive on this platform, though the standard theoretically allows for closer to 8 GB/s (~7877 MB/s), there is overhead to consider.
We move on from the real-world simulation of the PCMark 10 tests above, to the strictly synthetic CrystalDiskMark resutls below. As usual, I have run the tests with a single thread and at four different queue depths – 1, 2, 4, and 8.
We begin with sequential results: