Upgrade
Upgrade it: Solid-state drives
RAID
Paul Alcorn from Tom’s Hardware has some useful advice about the best drives to run in our new M.2 adaptor.
Of the key components in any PC, the storage drive is the slowest. A poor-performing drive often leads to a big bottleneck, forcing your processor (even if it’s one of the best CPUs) to waste clock cycles as it waits for data to crunch.
Finding the best SSD or solid-state drive for your specific system and needs is key if you want the best gaming PC or laptop, or even if you just want a snappy productivity machine. To find the best SSDs, we test dozens of drives each year, and it’s possible to have multiple categories, including the best SSD for NAS and the best SSD for the Steam Deck. Here we’re focusing on the ultimate for cheap and deep storage.
Picking the best SSD
The newest budget NVMe SSDs have undercut the pricing of mainstream drives on the slower SATA interface (which was originally designed for hard drives), but we shouldn’t expect to see the end of SATA SSDs any time soon.
The era of PCIe 5.0 SSDs is upon us, propelling us to new heights of stratospheric SSD performance. Blazing-fast PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, which offer up to twice the sequential speeds of the older PCIe 4.0 standard, are now supported by Intel and AMD’s current platforms, such as Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 and 14th-Gen Raptor Lake Refresh.
QUICK SHOPPING TIPS
● Pick a compatible interface (M.2 PCIe, SATA, add-in card). Look at your user manual or a database, such as the Crucial Memory Finder, to determine what types of SSD your computer supports. For our M.2 add-in card, obviously that fixes our choices.
● 1TB is the practical minimum for any PC build that costs more than £400 (perhaps one of the best PC builds); 2TB is the best SSD capacity for anyone who can spend over £150 on a drive; 500GB is the bare minimum anyone should consider at any price; 4TB drives have also plummeted recently, so good deals abound.
● M.2 SSDs are the fastest. M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs are the most common type of SSD on modern systems. These small, rectangular drives look like sticks of RAM, only smaller. They are usually 80mm long by 22mm wide, described as size 2280, but some may be shorter or longer, so make sure you get one that matches your slot.
● SATA is the slowest. It isn’t as fast as an M.2 SSD, but the majority of desktops and many laptops support 2.5-inch SATA drives and they tend to offer better value if speed isn’t a key issue.
If you want to populate a full M.2 adaptor, you need a host of NMVe drives.
It’s great if your system can handle a PCIe 5.0 drive, but they are still new and more expensive, so aren’t a requirement. For example, the PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro is our current choice for the best SSD overall and best SSD for gaming. It is rated for 7,450/6,900MB/s of sequential read/write throughput and 1.2/1.55 million read/write IOPS. That means less time waiting for game levels to load or videos to transcode, not to mention a snappier experience overall.