Addlink G55H review: This PCIe 5.0 SSD belongs on your short list

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Fastest PCIe 5.0 HMB SSD to date
• Affordable for PCIe 5.0
• Good warranty and TBW rating

Cons

• Pricier than PCIe 4.0 HMB, but not a lot faster in real-world operations

Our Verdict

The Addlink G55H is the fastest DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 SSD we’ve tested to date, albeit by a very narrow margin. But first place is first place, and it’s an affordable entry point to the latest standard in storage bus technology.

Price When Reviewed

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So, PCIe 5.0 DRAM-less, host memory buffer SSDs are now a thing — the Addlink G55H being the latest such beastie. It’s also the fastest I’ve tested, though you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference — even in our charts. But a win is a win, so put the G55H on your short list for PCIe 5.0 NVMe that doesn’t break the bank.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparison.

What are the Addlink G55H’s features?

The G55H is the latest DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD to pass through our portals. DRAM-less means the drive is a host buffer memory (HMB) implementation using system memory for primary caching duties.

The G55H’s Phison E31T controller will use a portion of the 218-layer NAND for secondary caching by writing it at first as single-bit SLC (Single Level Cell), then later natively as three-bit TLC (Triple Level Cell).

Addlink warranties the G55H for five years, and the drive is rated for 600TBW per 1TB of capacity. In other words, you can write up to 600TB to the 1TB drive without it turning read-only. Note that TBW is not always a real hard limit, with read-only kicking in only when there are no more over-provisioned (extra) NAND blocks to replace worn out ones.

How much does the Addlink G55H cost?

The 1TB G55H is $121.44 and the 2TB version $221.44 on Amazon at the time of this writing. Apparently, the price setters like straight percentages. I see this as a refreshing break from the tedious 99 cent psychological assault.

More salient to the review, those prices are pretty darn decent for a PCIe 5.0 HMB SSD at the moment. Around $20 cheaper than the competing Corsair MP700 Elite when we checked for this article. Of course, SSD pricing is always in flux, so shop around.

How fast is the Addlink G55H?

The G55H is plenty fast, ranking sixth overall out of all the NVMe SSDs we’ve tested — including PCIe 5.0 SSDs with DRAM. The margin between the G55H and DRAM designs is actually rather large in synthetic benchmarks — however, in the real world so far… not so much.

You may notice in the charts below that the numbers are extremely similar to those of the other two drives listed — the PNY CS2150 and the Corsair MP700 Elite. That’s because they’re basically the same drive. Same Phison controller, same type of NAND.

The CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential numbers look almost as if we’d chopped off the bars with a knife they’re so close. The G55H barely squeaked by the competition to a victory.

The story was a bit different in the CrystalDiskMark 4K tests with the Corsair MP700 Elite pulling slightly ahead of the PNY CS2150 and G55H.

Rising back to the top, the G55H was several seconds faster than its rivals with our 48GB transfers — a tad more than the two seconds we consider the margin of error in this test.

In the 450GB write, the G55H again lost out to the MP700 Elite, and by a noticeable, if not stunning margin.

If two out of four victories went to the MP700 Elite by larger margins, you might wonder why it ranked lower overall than the G55H. That’s because our AS SSD results, though not generally published, are also part of the overall formula. The G55H scored higher in those than its rivals, but in total, the differences between these three drives are so narrow as to be well within our test’s margin of error.

Note that while PCIe 5.0 shows much higher numbers on synthetic benchmarks than PCIe 4.0, that performance difference rarely manifests itself without software optimized for NMVe’s queues — which does not include Windows. Or a whole lot of anything else for that matter.

Should you buy the Addlink G55H?

I can’t think of a reason not to buy the G55H if you’re set on a PCIe 5.0 SSD — it’s every bit the drive its two current rivals are. But put in purely financial terms, you’re paying nearly twice as much for PCIe 5.0 as PCIe 4.0 with little current real-world benefit, though there may be in the future. My advice is that if you are set on PCIe 5.0, you let current price be the determining factor in which of these three HMB drives you choose.