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The era of PCIe 5.0 SSDs is upon us, propelling us to new heights of stratospheric SSD performance. Blazing-fast PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, which offer up to twice the sequential speeds of the older PCIe 4.0 standard, are now supported with Intel and AMD's current platforms, the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 and 13th-Gen Raptor Lake. Random Read (4 KB, QD1) Up to 13,000 IOPS Random Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated SSDs cost more per gigabyte than mechanical hard drives, though, and thus aren’t often available in ultra-high capacities. If you want speed and storage space, you can buy an SSD with limited space and use it as your boot drive, then set up a traditional hard drive as secondary storage in your PC. Place your programs on your boot drive, stash your media and other files on the hard drive, and you’re ready to have your cake and eat it too. How we test SSDs Controllers are a factor of SSD buying that only ultra-geeks will care about, but they're still important. The controller is a module on the SSD that essentially acts as the processor and traffic cop for the drive, translating the firmware instructions into features like error code correction (ECC) and SMART diagnostic tools, as well as modulating how well the SSD performs in general. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)
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. 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.
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Even PCIe 3.0 is significantly faster than SATA in straight-up sequential tests, though. But that's just sequential speeds, and how fast a drive can copy a folder from one part of itself to another isn't all that matters these days. There's also the issue of capacity,
Software is another shopping consideration that only the storage nerds out there might dig into, but regardless of which company you go with, any SSD software management dashboard should have at least a secure erase option, a firmware update module, and some kind of migration tool that will let you safely and securely move data from one drive to another. Most mainstream drives will have you covered there.
How Fast Is the SSD I'm Looking at?
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. In those tests, drives of every bus type, from PCIe 5.0 down to SATA 3.0, often can trade blows, and the best among them can take top marks away from drives that are much more expensive per gigabyte. If you're trying to get the most gaming, application, or operating system performance for the lowest cost per gig, you'll even find SATA-based options out there that remain competitive enough for most uses.
Capacity and price are important, of course, and a long warranty can alleviate fears of premature data death. Most SSD manufacturers offer a three-year warranty, and some nicer models are guaranteed for five years. But unlike the olden days of SSDs, modern drives won’t wear out with normal consumer usage, as Tech Report tested and proved years ago with a grueling endurance test. 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. In our tests, the Intel 670p loaded Final Fantasy at the same speed or faster than competitors. It also finished just two places below the vaunted PCIe 4.0 Samsung 980 Pro in PCMark 10. Those are very respectable marks for a budget drive. 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.)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. SATA-based SSDs have shown that in 4K random read and write, specifically, SATA isn't quite out of the game yet, offering performance in loading games or applications that's on par with... PCI Express: The Modern Speed Standard Then there's the difference between PCI Express generations. As you'd expect, drives speed up through each successive generation. PCIe 4.0 set peak-sequential speed records for consumer storage, and the first PCIe 5.0 drives have predictably blown these records away. PCIe 4.0 requires support from the specific desktop or laptop platform. PCIe 4.0 came to market with third- and fourth-generation Ryzen processors from AMD, and PCI Express 4.0 support is now available on the Intel side with Intel 500 Series chipset and later platforms with 11th to 14th Generation CPUs on the desktop. (It's also part of the company's mobile chip platforms from the 11th Generation onward. Indeed, the very latest desktop Intel platforms support the emerging PCIe 5.0 , whose system requirements are more onerous than PCIe 4.0.) On average, an internal SSD can cost anything from 8 cents per gigabyte for a basic drive to 50-plus cents per gigabyte for drives made specifically for filmmakers or other niche use cases. A general rule is that smaller drives (anything under 240GB) will cost more per gigabyte, getting cheaper as you go up to the 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacity tiers. Sometimes, though, a 4TB or 8TB drive will demand a price premium per gigabyte over the smaller-capacity models in a line. (Credit: Kyle Cobian) U.2 is rare in consumer PCs; it's mostly made with enterprise customers in mind. A U.2 drive like the now-vintage Intel SSD 750 Series connects to a U.2 port on the motherboard via a special cable, or to a PCI Express M.2 slot using a special adapter. These drives almost always come in the 2.5-inch form factor. Unless you have a U.2 port on your desktop motherboard you want to use, you can ignore them. (And even if you do, you can still probably hook up an M.2 drive.)
A further wrinkle around the PCIe bus: All recent drives and slots support a transfer protocol known as NVMe (for Non-Volatile Memory Express). NVMe is a standard designed with flash storage in mind (opposed to the older AHCI, which was created for platter-based hard drives). In short, if you want the fastest consumer-ready SSD, get one with NVMe in the name. You'll also need to be sure that both the drive and the slot support NVMe. (That's because some early M.2 PCIe implementations, and drives, supported PCIe but not NVMe.) (Credit: Molly Flores) The biggest thing to watch out for is the technology used to connect the SSD to your PC. We go into deeper details and buying advice in our guide on which type of SSD you should buy. The newest budget NVMe SSDs have undercut the pricing of mainstream drives on the slower SATA interface (which was originally designed for hard drives), but we shouldn't expect to see the end of SATA SSDs any time soon. 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. We've introduced you to M.2 drives and 2.5-inch drives above, but let's get into them in a bit more detail. 2.5-Inch SSDs: The Basic DriveCrucial's T700 is the world's fastest SSD, taking the hands-down performance lead in every performance category. That groundbreaking speed comes courtesy of the drive's PCIe 5.0 x4 connection, which offers a pathway for up to twice the throughput of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and the Phison E26 SSD controller paired with Micron's leading-edge 232-Layer 3D TLC flash. That potent common creates an SSD that's the fastest on the market for PC game loading times. For a desktop, the right SSD to buy depends much more on what you are doing with your computer, and what your aim is. If you're building a new PC from scratch, you definitely want an internal M.2 or 2.5-inch SATA SSD as your boot drive nowadays. A 2.5-inch SATA drive might make sense only if you're upgrading or building from older hardware, because almost all new motherboards now have at least one M.2 slot of some kind, and these drives save lots of space in compact PC builds. 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
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