What SSD to buy?

As you already should know SSD much much faster than traditional hard drives. And if you would like to buy one which should you buy?

Firstly thing, you have to figure out how much space you need. Usually these days I would recommend having around 500Gb SSD drive. You will install Windows and most software that you use everyday on SSD and rarely used stuff or stuff that is ok to be slow or just huge stuff on hard drive. If money is big issue, then you can buy 250GB and depending on how often you start computer per day you can install Windows on SSD or hard drive. I would not recommend buy 128GB drive unless money is huge issue. But I have to mention that modern 128GB and 250GB drives are usually slower than bigger SSD. If you have money and playing a lot of big games, or you really need to process a lot of huge files then you can buy 1TB drive.

Then you have to figure out interface. Currently there are two connectors: M.2 and SATA. For M.2 connector you can use NVME or SATA drives. So, you can have drive that has M.2 connector but it works exactly at same as SATA speeds. NVME drives on other side uses different protocol that reduces delays that SATA protocol has, and it was specifically developed for very fast devices while SATA was invented long time ago for slow mechanical disks. So NVME disks much faster to get data from disk.

Let’s talk in detail about M.2. Firstly, you should have it. It is relatively new interface and many old computers may not have it. Also, your motherboard may have it but there could be some issues because motherboard is one of the first that added support for M.2.

Secondly if you would like to use SSD drive as bootable drive you should have modern version of Windows to support it. And for NVME drives you need Windows 10.

Lastly M.2 drives have problem with cooling. During work chips can be hot. For normal SATA drives their whole case works as heatsink but for M.2 drives they usually uses metal label on top of them as heatsink. It is not even close as effective. Also, many motherboards have M.2 slot below video card and video card can be very hot. Even in case when M.2 slow above video card then it will be close to CPU heatsink and hot air from CPU heatsink will go over M.2 drive and giving it hard time. It will not die from overheating, it will just work slower. So, you have to think about cooling M.2 drives.

Ok, assume you have modern or new PC and thinking which drive to get.

Firstly, I do not recommend M.2 SATA because they are more expensive than simple SATA version and have sense only if you put them in notebooks where you cannot put 2.5” SATA drive due to space limitations. Speed is the same and SATA is very old and well supported technology.

M.2 NVME has more sense because they are much faster. And also, much more expensive (50% or more). But if you started to compare real world scenarios you will find that while speeds in synthetic tests are very high in practical work they are only 10%-20% faster. Say if you start game and measure time between start and when you can able to play difference could be about one second and sometimes even less. And NVME and SATA drives uses exactly the same chips, just uses different interface. So, unless you have a lot of money. I would recommend buying simple SATA version and buy better CPU or video card. It is where you will see more difference in performance. But here is one exception. Say if you buy disk and uses a lot of data intensive operations every day, say you have huge database and run very long queries on it then I would recommend buying NVME or even Intel Optane. But for normal everyday use I think NVME is overkill.

Also, I would like to mention that not all drives are the same. Say you have 2 500GB drives from different companies. There could be huge difference in performance between them. One drive can use slow flash chips, no DRAM buffer, slow CPU in controller etc. So, read reviews first but pay attention to everyday work.

I’m recommending buying drives from big companies that have a lot to lose if something going wrong and they do a lot of testing and they have good support. Right now, Samsung is the top SSD vendor. I have only good impressions with 850 EVO and 860 EVO. 970 PRO are quite fast if not fastest NVME drive. Crucial MX500 is good as well. Recently Western Digital and ADATA released good drive as well. Usually difference between say Samsung 500GB and Crucial is about $8 and $10 for 1TB model.

There are cheaper drives, but I personally prefer to stay away from them because they are not that much cheaper. Typically, around $20 so it is roughly 5-6 cups of coffee difference. But there are much smaller companies that have to cut corners to produce cheaper disks and I prefer not to risk my data. I’m not saying that these drives are bad, I just telling that because they use exactly the same technology they don’t have much room to do something better and cheaper.