SATA is cheaper but slower: If your computer supports NVMe/PCIe or Optane drives, consider buying a drive with one of these technologies.

And as 1TB drives slide below the $100/£100 price point, they're great, roomy options as well. 500GB offers a good balance between price and capacity.

500GB to 1TB capacity: Don't even consider buying a drive that has less than 256GB of storage.

If not, you may need a 2.5-inch drive instead.

Know your computer: Find out if you have slots for M.2 drives on your motherboard.

And in many ways, beyond the obvious bump in sequential performance, users might not see much in the way of real-world benefits from these drives. But there's no doubt that the next generation of PCIe 4.0 drives, like WD Black's SN850, are impressively agile. But you'll need an AMD X570 or B550 motherboard to run one of these drives at their top speed, or an Intel Z590 motherboard paired with one of Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S processors.

These drives indeed up sequential speeds dramatically (thanks to a doubling of the PCIe bus bandwidth). And existing SATA drives will have to continue falling in price as well, in order to at least compete on price, since they can't hope to keep up with NVMe drives on performance.īut NVMe PCIe 3.0 drives, once the fastest storage around, have been outclassed by PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs from the likes of Gigabyte, Corsair, Patriot and Samsung. That said, Samsung recently released the 870 EVO, so SATA isn't dead yet. But if you don't have a PhD in SSD, here are a few things you need to consider when shopping.Īs drives like Intel's 660p and its successor the Intel 665p start to undercut mainstream drives on the old SATA interface while delivering more speed, this could be the beginning of the end of our old friend, Serial ATA. And if you're after an external drive or SSD for portable storage or back up, be sure to check our Best External Drives page. If you already know about drive types and want specific recommendations, check out our Best SSDs page.

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