And if you're simply replacing a hard drive as your boot drive, you'll love the speed boost whichever kind you go with. We guarantee it.

Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request. GB/s is here to stay with the introduction of Teamgroup’s Cardea Z540 SSD. It set multiple records in our testing, beating out even the very fast Crucial T700. If you want the best storage performance possible right now, this drive is it. Its consistent sustained performance and DirectStorage-optimized firmware are additional bonuses, making it a great choice for high-end desktop gaming or workstation tasks. Faster drives are on the way, including Team’s own Z54A, but with a slowing storage market this is the king for now. M.2 slots are now common in new desktop motherboards and practically universal in late-model laptops. M.2 solid-state drives are the 2.5-inch drive distilled to its essence, extremely minimal in their design and implementation. But they're also the most complicated to understand before you buy. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado) PCI Express 5.0 is the latest and by far the fastest. It offers substantial throughput increases, with maximum read and write speeds of up to 14,000MBps, effectively double those of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. Only the latest high-end desktops support this bus off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from scratch or perform a motherboard and CPU transplant on an existing desktop. Intel users will need a 12th or 13th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor on an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset. Note: The board must specifically have a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, too; not every board with chipset-level support does! (Also know: Laptops can't leverage the peak speeds of these drives, yet.) Sequential Read Up to 560 MB/s Sequential Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configurationAn SSD metric called terabytes written (TBW) refers to the point where, after a certain amount of data being written to the drive, its cells will begin to fail, meaning the available space on the drive will shrink as the drive electronics compensate and take the failing cells offline. The TBW rating of a drive is usually anywhere between 100TBW and 3,500TBW, depending on the manufacturer, the capacity, and the use case, but for the most part this isn't a figure that will affect daily users. If you've read through this whole buying guide and have a particular port or slot not covered yet, that's because you probably have one of the two outlier ports installed in your system: U.2 or mSATA. Finally, the price of an SSD can also be affected by the memory element "method" used to store data. The four different types are single-level cell (SLC), multi-level cell (MLC), triple-level cell (TLC), and quad-level cell (QLC), respectively storing one to four bits per cell. SLC is both the fastest and most durable of the four types, but it's also the most expensive and rarely seen outside enterprise drives or as a chunk of cache used alongside one of the other technologies. MLC is less durable and a bit slower, but more reasonably priced, while TLC and QLC have pretty much taken over the mainstream; they are the least "durable" but also the cheapest. (More on drive endurance in a moment.) Random Write (4KB, QD32) Up to 88,000 IOPS Random Write * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated The PCIe 5.0 SSDs still have plenty to offer. The Crucial T700 is unquestionably the fastest consumer SSD in the world that you can actually buy, at least for now, delivering up to a blistering 12.4 GB/s of sequential throughput and 1.5 million random IOPS over the PCIe 5.0 interface. That's an amazing level of performance from an amazingly compact device.

The WD Red SN700 doesn’t offer anything special for the general user, but is great for use in a NAS. The underlying technology is also starting to show its age, but that maturity is important for critical storage systems like a NAS where performance isn’t as much of a focus. The WD Red SN700 also doesn’t have power loss protection, although that isn’t surprising as this drive isn’t for an enterprise application. However, the warranty and rated endurance are strong, which makes this a good buy for the right usage, which in this case is in a NAS. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Speed matters, of course, but as we said most modern SSDs saturate the SATA III interface. Not all of them, though. SSDs vs. hard drives SK hynix’s Gold P31 is great if you’re looking to increase your laptop storage, not only to gain capacity but to gain battery life, too. While some drives may perform well against the Gold P31 in benchmarking, the SK hynix is much more power-efficient, which will lead to longer off-the-charger sessions. Laptop users who prioritize battery life should definitely put the new SK hynix Gold P31 at the top of their drive list. Additionally, the Gold P31's very strong write performance and ultra-high efficiency make it a well-rounded choice for many desktop users as well. It's great if your desktop system can handle a PCIe 5.0 drive, but they are still new and expensive, so they aren't a requirement: For example, the PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro is our current choice for the best SSD overall, and the best SSD for gaming. This drive is rated for 7,450 / 6,900 MBps 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 in Windows.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have come a long way in recent years: a long way up in speed and capacity, and a long way down in price. Solid-state drives come in all shapes and sizes and are built for almost every purpose. Whether you need a drive whose first priority is dollar-savings, or one that will load up a 4K movie in less than half a second, there's an SSD made for the job. If an M.2 drive you're looking at has one of these special, big heatsinks on it, make sure your desktop's motherboard has the clearance above and around it to accommodate its bulk. Some desktop motherboards situate an M.2 slot right alongside the ideal expansion slot you'd use for your graphics card, for example, and the hardware can collide. Laptop designs typically can't stomach a special, tall heat sink at all. The SK hynix Gold P31 is still the gold standard for laptop SSDs, especially as it has DRAM, but it’s limited to PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, isn’t always available, and is limited to 2TB of capacity. The MP44 can get twice the bandwidth, but even in a 3.0 slot, it is inexpensive for 4TB and even has an 8TB option. Other alternatives, like the Crucial P3 Plus or Corsair MP600 Core XT, are slower and use QLC. The heatsink found on the Addlink A93 and other SSDs preclude them from laptop use and can add a little cost. Otherwise, the MP44 will have some competition at lower capacities, but it is worth a look if you can find it at the right price. The Solidigm P41 Plus is the best budget DRAM-less M.2 NVMe SSD on the market. It’s particularly good at 2TB, rivaling the 670p, which is older but comparable. This is no surprise as Intel’s NAND and SSD division migrated to Solidigm after a sale of the company to SK hynix, so the P41 Plus is reminiscent of that excellent budget drive. We would give the edge to the P41 Plus if you can make full use of the drive, which includes total Synergy 2.0 SSD driversupport. We’d also give the P41 Plus the edge over the P3 and P3 Plus if you’re shopping for your primary drive, as it has more consistent performance, even if maximum bandwidth is lower.