But big drives don't come cheap (especially when you're talking about SSDs rather than hard drives), so knowing the value of an SSD and how much it costs per gigabyte is another important factor to weigh in your next upgrade. Whether it's 128GB or 4TB (or any capacity, really), the cost per gigabyte will give you a baseline to compare one drive against another and whether or not it looks like a good value based on its features and durability rating. Intel Optane Memory drives, on the other hand, can massively accelerate a fully mechanical drive. These resemble M.2 SSDs, and plug into the same slot on the motherboard, but instead of acting like a separate drive they become an ultra-fast cache for the main HDD. Unlike hybrid drives, we’ve seen Optane-boosted hard disks exceed 1,500MB/sec read speeds, so they’re great for accelerating a PC that only has HDD storage; you don’t have to move your Windows installation over, either. 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)

mSATA, short for mini-SATA, is a predecessor to the M.2 form factor. It was primarily built into laptops, though some older desktop motherboards may have an mSATA slot aboard. With mSATA, the slots and drives use only the SATA bus, unlike M.2's SATA and PCIe support. For all intents and purposes, mSATA is a dead end, though you might run into it if you have an older laptop or desktop. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) So, it makes sense to give yourself plenty of headroom and make sure that you won’t have to go through the hassle of expanding your storage again in a year or two. As a rough guide, we’d suggest that 2TB ought to be enough to cover modest storage needs for the foreseeable future: more hardcore users should consider going up to 4TB. Do I need to worry about performance? 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.Ebuyer's collection of 4TB internal drives are engineered by trusted manufacturers to deliver quality performance while emitting the lowest levels of waste noise and heat. is a huge data capacity and will allow you to store everything your family can throw at it. Hundreds of albums of family photos and home movies can sit comfortably alongside your ever-expanding film and music collection. Hours Upon Hour Of Video Western Digital’s Blue range comprises its “value” drives, so while this 4TB unit is certainly cheap – you’re paying just 2.5p per gigabyte of storage – raw performance isn’t a priority. A spindle speed of 5,400RPM means it’s less responsive than pricier rivals, and sequential read and write speeds only hit around 130MB/sec in our tests. You also get just a two-year warranty. 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 Seagate Skyhawk AI HDD is designed with “AI'' firmware to improve the drive’s ability to handle recording, video analysis, and GPU analytics workloads. This includes up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams with zero dropped frames. This is combined with a robust warranty, including a high workload rate and Seagate’s three-year data recovery service. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,300MB/s | Sequential write speed: 6,000MB/s | NAND type: 3D TLC | TBW: 1,000TBThat said, while almost any SSD is much faster than any hard drive, not all SSDs are created equal—not by a long shot. SSD interfaces have evolved greatly over the last few years, and SSDs themselves are taking on different shapes and core technologies.

Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 6,600MB/s | Sequential write speed: 5,000MB/s | NAND type: Micron TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros:

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The ever-decreasing price of solid state drives (SSDs) means that traditional hard disks are less commonplace than they once were. However, as media libraries grow larger, and 4K video becomes commonplace, there’s still a role for affordable, high-capacity storage – and that’s where hard drives are at their strongest. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,300MB/s | Sequential write speed: 6,300MB/s | NAND type: 3D TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros: Before we jump into the list of the best drives we've tested recently, we should mention that although this is a roundup of the best internal SSDs, these days just about any such drive can be turned into an external USB unit with the help of an SSD enclosure. These are often little more than durable housings of plastic or metal, and you can buy enclosures for almost any type of SSD: SATA 2.5-inch, SATA M.2, or PCIe M.2. Just make sure that the enclosure supports the form factor and bus type of the drive you want to "externalize." Of course, you can also buy premade external SSDs; we've rounded up the best of them, as well. 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.) Seagate Firecuda‘drives’ are perfect for your SSHDapplications and as with desktop HDD’s, SSHDareavailable in 2.5” and 3.5” options.

You can’t do much better for a PS5 SSD than the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX. It’s not the fastest drive out there, but it’s plenty speedy enough. And with the chunky in-built heatsink, plus a price that often drops well below that of other SSDs of similar speeds, it’s the best PS5 SSD for those who want large and reliable expanded storage. If you've read through this whole buying guide and have a particular port or slot not covered yet, that's because you probably have one of the two outlier ports installed in your system: U.2 or mSATA. We also test power consumption and temperature. Power consumption will vary with drive performance, RPM, and more, and it’s important to look at four different cases: maximum power draw, average power draw, idle power draw, and workload efficiency. Power usage can add up with multiple drives. Temperature is also an important metric for hard drives, as overheating is a common cause of failure, particularly during sustained workloads. 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.

What Capacity Do You Need, and What's the Cost per Gigabyte?

Right now, the five main processes in 3D NAND are 32-layer, 64-layer, 96-layer, 128-layer, and 176-layer. More layers don't necessarily bring a performance bonus, but generally bring a lower price for drives of the same capacity. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,500MB/s | Sequential write speed: 5,650MB/s | NAND type: Micron TLC | TBW: 700TB Pros: A hybrid drive is a regular hard disk that features a small built-in SSD, which it uses to accelerate performance. It works by learning which files you access frequently and caching these in the high-speed solid-state storage. Since it’s all handled silently by the drive controller, it’s very hard to say anything with confidence about what sort of performance benefit you’ll really see. What’s certain is that the drive won’t be able to cache all of Windows and your frequently used applications, so you won’t experience performance that’s as good as you’d see from a regular SSD. Finally, the price of an SSD can also be affected by the memory element "method" used to store data. The four different types are single-level cell (SLC), multi-level cell (MLC), triple-level cell (TLC), and quad-level cell (QLC), respectively storing one to four bits per cell. SLC is both the fastest and most durable of the four types, but it's also the most expensive and rarely seen outside enterprise drives or as a chunk of cache used alongside one of the other technologies. MLC is less durable and a bit slower, but more reasonably priced, while TLC and QLC have pretty much taken over the mainstream; they are the least "durable" but also the cheapest. (More on drive endurance in a moment.)