MILLENNIAL MAXIMUM PC readers may find it hard to fathom that solid-state drives first hit the market 33 years ago in 1991. SSDs rely on non-volatile memory (usually NAND flash). This means they have no moving parts, resulting in better data transfer speeds and reduced latency compared to mechanical hard drives.

Over the years, SSDs have undergone a number of revisions. The current gold standard is PCIe 5.0, which offers blazingly fast read and write speeds of up to 16GB/s. However, much depends on the number of corresponding PCIe lanes on the CPU. The number of lanes dedicated specifically to the SSD varies by the type of chip used.

This may explain why SSDs using PCIe 4.0 remain a much more popular option, even though optimal read/write speeds are only 8GB/s.

Because of the successive generations of SSDs, there’s also a lot of outdated information online on how to truly improve performance. For instance, while enabling AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode can increase the speeds of SATA SSDs, NVMe drives using a PCIe interface won’t experience any performance improvement.

In this guide, you’ll learn the steps to take to increase the effective speed of your SSD. You’ll also learn how to benchmark your drive to check your changes have taken effect.

–NATE DRAKE

1 SELECT YOUR SSD

If you’re considering upgrading your current device or drive, remember not all SSDs are created equal. Most modern SSD drives follow the M.2 format [Image A]. This specification was introduced in 2012 as a replacement to mSATA format. M.2 SSDs have a small, rectangular shape but can vary in size, so most modern motherboard slots can accommodate different lengths.

» M.2 SATA SSDs make use of the SATA interface and are capable of comparable read/write speeds to the old-style 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. They typically reach around 550-600MB/s for sequential read/write operations. This is much faster than traditional magnetic drives but speeds are limited by the SATA interface.

» More recent M.2 NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs can be attached directly to the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) on a motherboard. This results in much faster speeds over drives using the SATA interface.

» With these types of drives, the overall throughput depends on the number of PCIe lanes on the CPU. These are the physical link between the PCIe-supported device and the processor/ chipset. PCIe 4.0 uses four lanes, resulting in maximum throughput of 8GB/s.