SSD Buyer's Guide - PC Guide https://www.pcguide.com Practical Guides to PC & Tech at Home, Work, and Play Sat, 20 Apr 2024 14:39:42 +0000 en-US https://www.pcguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PCguide-favicon-75x75.png SSD Buyer's Guide - PC Guide https://www.pcguide.com 32 32 Best SSD for Xbox – our top picks for Series X and S https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-xbox/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=299028 Wed, 31 Jan 2024 10:34:26 +0000 Best SSD for Mac in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-mac/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=299003 Wed, 31 Jan 2024 10:09:05 +0000 Best SSD for Steam Deck in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-steam-deck/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=298566 Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:25:59 +0000 Best SSD for NAS in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-nas/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=298525 Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:07:03 +0000 Best SSD for laptop in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-laptop/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=297921 Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:18:48 +0000 Best SSD for gaming in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-gaming/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=1912 Thu, 03 Aug 2023 16:08:16 +0100 Best NVMe SSD in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-nvme/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=2615 Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:27:47 +0100 Best budget SSD in 2024 – our top cheap picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-budget/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=2489 Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:55:05 +0100 Best SSD for PS4 Pro and Slim in 2024 – our top picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-for-ps4-pro/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=23330 Wed, 18 Jan 2023 15:24:43 +0000 Best portable SSD in 2024 – our top external drive picks https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/best-portable/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=3319 Tue, 06 Aug 2019 19:36:42 +0100 NVMe vs M.2 vs SATA: Which is the best for your SSD? What are these?What even are these? What sets apart an NVMe drive from an M.2 drive? M.2 NVMe drives exist-- is there even a difference!? Why bother buying an M.2 SSD when a SATA SSD is usually cheaper?It’s time to answer all of these questions.

What is a SATA SSD?

A SATA SSD is an SSD with a SATA interface. SATA, or Serial AT Attachment, refers to the storage standard that’s been used by PCs for nearly the past twenty years.SATA HDDs and SSDs come in either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch enclosures, respectively. HDDs can come in both (with a speed sacrifice for a smaller form factor), but SSDs are generally only shipped in 2.5 enclosures and are often even smaller on the inside.SATA has evolved quite a bit since its initial release in 2000, but even the best SATA SSDs’ transfer rate caps out at around 600 MB/s in pure speed capabilities on the latest SATA 3 motherboards. (SATA HDDs, if you’re curious, cap out at around 110 MB/s.)This speed is far faster than anything an old-school, mechanical HDD is capable of, so a SATA SSD is still a worthwhile upgrade over a SATA HDD. Compared to the others on this list, it’ll be the most noticeable leap in quality of life-- but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk about the others, too.

What is M.2?

M.2 is the successor to the original mSATA standard (hence the “2”), and it greatly decreases the size of a given drive. M.2 drives only come as SSDs, since the format is far too small for a mechanical arrangement.M.2 SSDs are most often seen in laptops, but many desktops are using the technology, too. Thanks to the minuscule size of an M.2 drive, using M.2 SSDs is quite the viable replacement to a SATA drive array, especially in small form factor PC builds.Your typical M.2 SSD uses the motherboard’s pre-existing SATA bandwidth for its drive. This means it has the same speed limit as a SATA SSD would, it’s just smaller and doesn’t require running any extra cables.However, some M.2 SSDs also come in the NVMe format. Not every M.2 SSD is NVMe, but every modern NVMe SSD is M.2.

What is NVMe?

NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express. If the “Express” seems familiar to you, there’s a reason for that: NVMe expansions happen to use PCI Express bandwidth, as opposed to SATA bandwidth. That means the peak speed of an NVMe SSD is much, much higher than an SSD powered by SATA bandwidth, whether it’s 2.5-inch or M.2.Let’s dig deeper into these differences, shall we?

How do they compare?

If you paid close attention to the previous section, you may already have an idea where this is going.

SATA M.2 vs SATA 2.5-Inch/Standard

A SATA SSD’s max potential throughput is 600 MB/s, but in most real-world scenarios this actually ends up being just about 500 MB/s… maybe 550 MB/s if you’re lucky. This is roughly half a gigabyte per second-- certainly not bad, by any means, but far from the maximum capabilities of solid-state storage.If an M.2 SSD is using SATA bandwidth, the same speed limitations still apply… but the drive tends to be much smaller although they cost about the same. Even using SATA bandwidth, an M.2 SSD will almost always be the better choice as long as your system supports both options.If an M.2 SSD is using PCI Express bandwidth (via NVMe), then there’s no competition at all. Let’s talk about that scenario.

M.2 NVMe vs M.2 SATA

An M.2 NVMe and an M.2 SATA drive will look pretty much identical on the surface level: super-thin and about as long as your thumb. Modern NVMe drives are made to utilize PCI Express Gen 3 bandwidth, though, and this far exceeds SATA bandwidth in terms of speed.Your SATA SSD-- M.2 or not-- will cap out below 600 MB/s.Your NVMe SSD, meanwhile, can achieve speeds as high as 3.5 GB/s. That’s multiple times faster than even the best SATA SSD and it leaves traditional HDD technology in the dust as little more than a distant memory (unless you need bulk storage in which case your bank account might pull HDDs back into your perspective).And that’s not even all, either...

What about PCI Express Gen 4?

PCI Express Gen 4 is around the corner with NVMe SSDs to match!At the time of writing, this will only be for AMD’s X570 chipset… but Intel is sure to follow suit within a year or less. PCI Express Gen 4 has allowed companies, like Corsair, to release products like the MP600, which boasts a devastating speed of up to 4.9 GB/s. This isn’t even the peak, either, since PCI Express Gen 4 leaves room for even more improvements-- up to twice as fast as Gen 3, in theory!It’s no contest at all: NVMe has won the speed race. But does that mean it’s right for you?

Picking the right one for you

While we’ve hyped up NVMe SSDs quite a lot, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the right picks for everyone. Allow us to explain.

Which is better for general use?

For general use, the best pick is a SATA SSD. M.2 or 2.5-inch, it doesn’t really matter. Using an SSD at all is a dramatic leap in quality of life from using any mechanical hard drive, but you don’t get leaps on the same scale when you bump up to M.2 and NVMe. There are a few different reasons for this, but we’ll hyper-simplify it to make it easier to understand.Let’s say that your PC takes 25 seconds to boot from a hard drive. You replace that hard drive with a SATA SSD, and now your PC can boot in 10 seconds. Further replacing that SATA SSD with an NVMe SSD may cut that boot time down even further-- to 5 seconds, even!...but that’s not nearly as big a difference in real-world use, is it? Either way is pretty darn fast. Once you get to your desktop and start launching apps, you’re unlikely to notice a difference… especially if the rest of your system can’t keep up. More on that in a bit.

Which is better for professional use?

For professional use, you want either an NVMe SSD or PCI Express SSD. At least if your job requires access to fast storage and frequent large file transfers, where all this extra speed will actually come in handy. If it doesn’t, you can probably pass.

Which is better for gaming?

Last but not least...gaming.Surely an NVMe SSD is the best for gaming, right?Well, yes, but…It won’t make the difference you think it will. This is where our old friend bottlenecking comes into the equation.While NVMe SSDs are far faster than any SATA drive, the rest of the system needs to keep up, too. The bulk of this burden will fall upon your processor, but even with a powerful processor like the i7-8700K, the difference is minimal in real-world gaming scenarios. If your processor is weaker than that, you may even experience worse performance.Don’t get us wrong: you should still get an SSD, but unless you’re a true pro gamer or have the highest-end system at your fingertips… NVMe isn’t a super-necessary upgrade over a SATA hard drive. If you find an NVMe SSD at a good price, you should still go for it-- and if you make a lot of large file transfers, then you may have legitimate incentive to buy it.Otherwise, though, a SATA SSD will be best for most consumers, gamers and casual users alike.]]> https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/nvme-vs-m-2-vs-sata/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=5355 Fri, 19 Jul 2019 00:26:27 +0100 SSD vs HDD – The Detailed Explanation & Comparison What is HDD?To understand the difference between SSD and HDD, perhaps it is best that I first explain how a Hard Disk Drive works.Inside the shiny (or dusty) body of a hard drive, there are several metal platters with a magnetic coating that stores whatever data you put on it. The platters are stacked vertically and usually the more platters you have, the more storage your Hard Drive has. Above the platter is an arm that contains a "head" that reads and writes data to and from the Hard Drive while you’re using it. Platters come in a variety of speeds but the most common ones are 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM (rotations per minute). Obviously, the faster the disc speed is, the better the performance. Most laptops come with a 5400 RPM drive but can be upgraded to 7200 or higher.HDDs store your data by using magnets. Imagine you need to send a message to a friend and all you have is a magnet and iron nail. You could stipulate that if the nail is magnetized, then you will see your friend later. Now, when your friend comes home and sees the nail sticking to their mailbox, they know your answer. In this way, we can use magnets to encode information.An HDD is like a box that contains millions and millions of tiny iron nails, each one capable of storing a bit of information: either a 1 or a 0 (magnetized or unmagnetized).As the arm reads each nail, it returns a 1 or 0, the entire string of binary digits corresponding to some piece of information stored on the drive. Of course, HDDs don’t actually have microscopic nails in them. The metal platters are divided into tiny sectors of a very small area, each of which can be independently magnetized (1) or demagnetized (0). As the arm goes over the platter, it checks to see if the sector is magnetized or not and returns the corresponding sequence of binary digits.So say you want to store the number “65” on your HDD. In binary, 65 is represented as the string “1000001.” To do this, the arm on the HDD needs to find 7 consecutive unused “nails.” It then magnetizes the first one making a 1, skips over the next 5 making 5 zeroes and then magnetizes the 7th one making the last 1.

What Is SSD?

No matter how fast your Hard Disk Drive is, it can not keep up with a decent Solid State Drive (SSD). Down to the very basics, an SSD and an HDD do basically the same thing… but in very different ways.Whereas a Hard Drive uses platters to store memory, an SSD uses interconnected flash-memory chips and doesn't require a moving arm/head to read memory. The fewer moving parts you have, the better since moving parts wear out quicker, are slower (at least in this case), and more fragile.A “typical” SSD uses what is known as “NAND flash memory.” This kind of memory is very similar to what’s found in USB flash drives. NAND flash memory involves storing information in a network of connected electrical cells. The exact sequence of information is encoded in the connections between these electrical cells. Each of these cells is divided into sections called “pages” and several pages together make a “block.”This part is important because SSDs cannot individually write over specific pages. Unlike an HDD which can read and write virtually any section on the platter independently, SSDs need to handle memory in blocks. When you first buy a clean SSD, it has plenty of blank blocks that it can write to with blazing fast speed. As time goes on and these blocks get filled, there is less room to store data. As such, the SSD must go through a complicated procedure to check each individual block, see which pages are blank, rewrite the entire block, then write the new memory to the block.This causes SSDs to get slower over time as the act of writing to memory becomes less efficient. However, this can be at least partially mitigated if you are using a larger drive that is rarely close to being full. Even taking this performance drop into account, SSDs are still much faster than HDDs, though.

Tangible Differences Between SSDs and HDDs

As with everything in this world, both types of storage have their advantages and disadvantages which I'll list below:

Price (per GB)

At the time of writing, a brand new 1 Terabyte (TB) 7200 RPM will cost you around $32 while a brand new 1 Terabyte (TB) SSD will run you close to $100.As with most consumer-facing technologies, prices start off high but slowly plummet over time. According to PCPartPicker.com, a brand new SSD-- which had a much smaller capacity-- would have cost you $400 in December 2017; today they can be had for as low as $90. As flash memory becomes cheaper to produce, consumers can continue to look forward to lower prices across the board.Still, if you need lots of memory on a budget, an HDD is the way to go.

Durability and Longevity

Remember how HDDs have moving parts? Well, they can cause a few problems. Some are relatively small, like some noise, but others are more… comprimising.For instance, accidental drops can easily mess up HDDs. The arm in a Hard Drive contains a head which hovers above the platters while the disk is on and parks while they're off. If you drop your laptop/desktop and the head hits, or even touches the disc, you're in for a world of trouble.Obviously, this cannot happen with a Solid State Drive because there aren't any heads or discs to touch; thus, SSD's win in the longevity department. Another concern with moving parts is the wear and tear they have to endure. The more a platter spins and the more data is read by an arm/head combo, the closer a Hard Drive gets to the end of its life.However, it is worth noting that, even though SSDs generally beat out HDDs in terms of longevity, SSDs – due to the way they read and write information – can only handle a finite amount of reads/writes. Over time and repeated reads/writes, the electrical cells degrade and eventually will not be able to store information anymore.For your average person, neither of these will be a big deal since you won’t read/write enough data. You’re more likely to just have it stop working.

Data Security

Anyone who has watched CSI probably knows that it is possible to recover data from an HDD even when it has been permanently deleted (aka, the sectors have been demagnetized). This presents a security risk for users as their personal data can still be accessed from an old hard drive, provided it is still intact.To be clear, it is entirely possible to recover deleted data from an SSD. Because of how an SSD reads/writes memory, writing over used data blocks may not always completely get rid of all old data. However, many SSDs have a built-in deletion mechanism that can completely get rid of data– it just depends on how exactly you get rid of it.Additionally, since they are newer, techniques for extracting deleted information from SSDs are not as good as those for HDDs. In other words, an SSD might be more secure with your information, provided you know what you are doing with it.

Form Factors

HDDs and SSDs can both come in 2.5” or 3.5” form factors. These use the traditional SATA connector. While this is fine for HDDs, SATA does bottleneck SSDs.While SATA SSDs are fine, if you are looking for ungodly speed, then M.2 NVMe SSDs, which utilize the PCI lanes on your motherboard, are what you truly want. Oh and these are also smaller, as can be seen below. We actually recently wrote a different article about the different types of SSDs, so be sure to check that out if you want to know more.

Read/Write Speed

As stated above, just installing an SSD can significantly increase your system’s speed while booting and loading applications. Even a budget SSD will be faster than the highest end HDD's thanks to their flash memory and lack of moving parts.The difference between the two is the same as the difference between having to walk across the room to get a book and magically having the book open in front of you at all times. Below, you can see how much speedier my Samsung Evo 850 is compared to my Seagate Hard Disk Drive.By the way, just in case you were confused by the above images, sequential access means the computer reads/writes info sequentially, starting from the beginning and reading to the end. It is faster than random access, which, as you may have guessed, means the computer can read information from anywhere in the data file. RAM uses this method to find data, hence the name “Random Access Memory”.

Conclusion: SSD or HDD?

Overall, if what you're looking for is snappy performance and longevity, then what you need is a Solid State Drive. However, if what you really need is tons of storage at dirt cheap prices, a Hard Disk Drive will still serve you well for years to come.On the whole, SSDs come out on top in the SSD vs hard drive debate. Hopefully, the increased affordability of SSDs will eventually make them cheaper and more accessible to all users, not just the enthusiasts.I think my coffee is done (I’m a fast writer.). Thanks for reading!]]> https://www.pcguide.com/ssd/guide/ssd-vs-hdd/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=4200 Mon, 24 Jun 2019 20:27:04 +0100