The Crucial T500 is for users willing to pay a little extra to get the best PCI Express 4.0 SSD performance. At a time when many low-priced DRAM-less SSDs are hitting the market, the T500 has a full DRAM cache (as well as a top-shelf Phison controller and 232-layer TLC NAND flash), which could give it an advantage in sustained large-file transfers, as well as in use with the PS5. The earliest versions of M.2 PCI Express SSDs made use of the PCI Express Gen 2.0 x2 interface, which defines a throughput ceiling that's higher than SATA 3.0's, but not enormously so. That evolved into PCI Express Gen 3.0 x2 and x4, paired with a technology called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) to propel performance even further, especially with heavy, deeply queued workloads. Welcome to the cutting edge! You're shopping for a kind of drive that many folks don't even realize exists. As a result, you need to pay attention to several factors that may not be documented very well while you shop. Let's recap.

We mentioned NVMe above. NVMe is another technical hurdle to consider, because systems and motherboards need board-level support for these drives to be bootable. All late-model motherboards now support NVMe M.2 drives, but older boards are not guaranteed to support booting from an NVMe-based drive. Outside of new motherboards, these high-bandwidth, NVMe-capable slots are also found in some recent laptops. Also note that in some cases, a laptop may support a PCI Express NVMe drive, but it may be soldered to the motherboard and thus not upgradable. So, if you're thinking of upgrading a recent laptop or convertible, be sure to consult your manual very closely before buying one of these drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) Get the Advantage - Lightning-fast Gen4 performance up to 7400MB/s read, 6700MB/s write (Sequential Speed), and up to 950K I0PS read, 950K I0PS write (Random Speed) Early examples of the latest generation of M.2 drives, using the PCI Express 5.0 bus, also come in the Type-2280 format, but it's expected that some PCIe 5.0 slots on new motherboards will be built to support the larger Type-25110 format (25mm by 110mm), so we may well see PCIe 5.0 SSDs with these dimensions as well. PCIe 5 drives are capable of tremendous throughput speeds (in excess of 10,000MBps) that should generate abundant heat, and the SSDs we have seen so far come with substantial built-in heatsinks. Built for top-tier gaming and high-performance PCs - Incredibly short load times for an insane gaming experience. Also Ideal for smooth video and photo editing, 3D rendering, machine & deep learning and VR No responsibility is taken for the correctness of this information. The listed offers do not constitute legally binding advertising claims of the merchants.Though it can't quite match the gaming prowess of some of the latest generation of PCIe 4.0 speedsters, the 990 Pro with Heatsink still offers respectable gaming performance while being a thoroughbred workhorse for creative tasks. It's an appealing choice and a worthy upgrade from the 980 Pro. Know which bus you're on. In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in. But first, the shape issue. Any M.2 drive you are looking at will be labeled with a four- or five-digit number as part of its specifications or model name. It's a measurement, in millimeters: The first two numbers define the drive's width, the second two the length. We actually like these because often, you often get a robust heat sink on the M.2 drive. Some PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained read/write tasks and throttle their speed. That said, unless you're running a server or something similar, where a drive is constantly getting hammered with reads and writes, that's usually not something you have to worry about. That's because many of these drives are so fast, they get their transfer duties done before they have a chance to get all that hot.

One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's "Optane SSDs" were SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Intel sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which spun it off into a new subsidiary, Solidigm.)The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow in the Editors' Choice-winning SSD 980 Pro, but for the most part it makes a great product even better. This power-efficient drive gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. The heatsink-equipped version of this drive performed slightly better than the non-heatsink version (which we tested using our testbed's motherboard's heatsink) in most of our benchmarks. It doesn't quite merit the 980 Pro's Editors' Choice award, because other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For If you're a custom PC builder with RGB-lighting fever, and have RGB-ified just about every inch and corner of your system, perk up: ADATA has brought pretty lights to the internal SSD final frontier. The XPG Spectrix S40G is the most flamboyant NVMe drive we've seen to date. With its exceptional 4K write speeds, top-notch sequential-read speeds, and respectable durability rating, ADATA makes having a top-of-the line, over-the-top SSD affordable and fun, in one fell swoop. Who It's For The first attempt was a new form factor called mini-SATA, or mSATA. The boiled-down essence of an SSD with the shell removed, an mSATA drive is a bare, rectangular circuit board. (Most mSATA drives relevant to upgraders measure about 1 by 2 inches.) mSATA drives fit into a special slot in a laptop's logic board or on a PC motherboard. As the name suggests, the slot is a conduit to the Serial ATA bus in the system. The interface on the drive end is an edge connector on the PCB, as opposed to the usual SATA cabling. The mSATA drive also draws all the power it needs through the slot. (Credit: HP) The key thing to remember about M.2 is that it is a form factor, a shape. The bus—the data pathway over which the data travels to and from an M.2 drive—is distinct from M.2 itself and can vary. And it can make all the difference. (Credit: Molly Flores) The built-in heatsink provides optimal heat dissipation to reduce thermal throttling, and maximise the peak performance for an incredibly smooth gaming experience

That's not a bad thing. Especially in the case of laptops, an older machine might support only M.2 SATA-bus SSDs, and that will be the boundary of your upgrade path...end of story. As a result, the only reasons you'd upgrade the drive, in that situation, would be to get more capacity, or if the old one failed. The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40 is an unapologetically bright RGB-lit PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD that blings up your PC. Its 4K read and write speeds should keep most gamers happy, too. The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G carries some respectable wins out of its duel with other competing drives we've tested, and it looked great doing it.The T700 is for gamers, creatives, and professionals seeking the ultimate in solid-state drive performance that today only a Gen 5 SSD offers. But unless your desktop is a recent, high-performance model that supports this standard, being able to run a PCI Express 5.0 SSD at peak speeds requires a considerable additional investment. You must buy a recent desktop that supports SSDs built on the PCIe 5.0 standard, upgrade an existing recent rig, or build one from scratch. By making such an investment and having the T700 serve as its brains, though, you're future-proofing your entire setup. Get the Advantage - Lightning-fast Gen4 performance up to 7200MB/s read, 6000MB/s write (Sequential Speed), and up to 750K I0PS read, 1000K I0PS write (Random Speed) The Advantage PRO-1 is Integral’s fastest Gen4 SSD range with heatsink that delivers an ultimate performance, meeting the most demanding gaming, video and photo editing, 3D rendering, machine & deep learning and VR needs. These SSDs reach the fastest speeds of up to 7400MB/s read, 6700MB/s write (Sequential Speed) and 950K IOPS read, 950K write (Random Speed). At the core, an SSD is just a thin circuit board studded with flash-memory and controller chips. Why not design around that? Thus the M.2 form factor was born. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Smaller-capacity 32GB and 64GB M.2 SSDs are also available for use in embedded applications or for SSD caching, but these are of marginal interest to upgraders or PC builders. Pricing on these drives ranges anywhere from 10 to 75 cents per gigabyte, and the biggest factor affecting price is the bus type of the drive. Nowadays, though, many lean, premium laptops can make use of PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs. (Just about all new desktop motherboards with M.2 slots also support PCI Express M.2 SSDs, too.) With these, you may see a substantive increase in performance in benchmark testing, but in most real-world usage, they'll just feel like a fast, premium SATA SSD. (Credit: Molly Flores)

Of course, to show off the lighting, you will need to have an open-frame rig, or one with a see-through case. If you've already RGB'd your keyboard, mouse, video card, motherboard, case, and headphones, and are at a loss for what's left, the Spectrix S40G makes enough sense both in performance and looks to belong in any lighting-obsessed custom PC builder's arsenal.