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. When it comes to heat output, the Phison E12S and 8TB of NAND can run toasty under load, but will usually be fine during light use with little to no airflow. However, we tested the SSD with 100-200GB file transfers without any airflow and the controller measured a peak temperature of 82.4 degrees Celsius (C). The SMART data read 71C, while the NAND measured 64C. Those temperatures triggered performance throttling. For the most consistent performance under prosumer-like use or large file transfers, it would be best to direct some airflow to the drive or place it under your motherboard’s M.2 heatsink. M.2 drive length isn't always an indicator of drive capacity, but therearelimits to NAND-chip density and how many memory modules engineers can stuff onto a PCB of a given size. As a result, most of the M.2 drives we've seen to date have topped out at 2TB, though you can find a few 4TB and 8TB models at lofty prices. The typical capacity waypoints are as follows: 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) We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

My laptop is running on Linux Mint 19.3 booted from an MLC NVMe drive. I have a 4TB 2.5" MLC SSD for data frequently accessed, written, edited, and deleted. Normally, one wants to maintain 20-25% free space on an SSD to help ensure minimal fragmentation (yes, SSDs fragment but that will be kept to a level an SSD can easily handle as long as TRIM is enabled and there is plenty of free space on the drive). Generally, the more often a drive will be written to, the greater amount of free space one wants to maintain. Since my drive will be mostly read only, I can get away with maintaining the lower limit of free space. The one partition I have fully populated is only 80.6% full so there is plenty of free space there. The partition I'm currently slowly populating will not reach maximum usable capacity for quite some time. South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix is a relative newcomer to the consumer solid-state drive market, but you would never know that based on its first offerings. The SK Hynix Platinum P41, a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, is its best yet. It dominated our PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage benchmark testing, setting several new records in the process. The P41 supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. SK Hynix provides a clone utility tool, the SK Hynix System Migration Utility, for its SSDs, in addition to Easy Drive Manager software, which lets you see detailed information on drive health, run diagnostics, and erase the drive. And the P41 can be had for a very reasonable price in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. Who It's ForKioxia originally demonstrated the technical specifications for BiCS5 at ISSCC 2019. The original design was a 128-layer quad-plane design with a CMOS-under-Array (CuA) configuration. However, the BiCS we tested here is a 112-layer dual-plane design without CuA. These compromises suggest a bigger focus on production efficiency (density and yield), which explains the 1Tb dies used here. These characteristics have potentially impacted other drives by WD that have had their flash upgraded or replaced. In my case it was perfect, I just had to swap the port of one of the 2 SATA SSDs and I was ready to go. The Addlink AddGame A93 is a good choice for budget-conscious users looking for a high-performing general-purpose PCI Express 4.0 SSD, either as an upgrade for a desktop computer or to add extra storage space to a PS5. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,300MB/s | Sequential write speed: 6,300MB/s | NAND type: 3D TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros:

In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. 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. The 870 QVO’s write speed comes in at 530MB/s, while the read speed is set at a slightly higher 560MB/s. The write endurance of the SSD is rated at 2,880 TB, much higher than the QLC NVMe SSDs we saw earlier. The high capacity of the 870 QVO and its 2.5-inch form factor makes it the ideal choice for replacing your existing high-capacity hard drives, as the performance gains will be pretty significant than even the fastest ones.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. 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. This flash is more or less equivalent to 128-layer TLC from other manufacturers, such as that found on the 980 Pro by Samsung or on the Gold P31 by SK hynix. BiCS5 should come with a bit lower latency than the old 96-layer BiCS4 flash that’s been used in many products and often as an alternative to Micron’s 96-layer B27B TLC. We’ve seen good results from it on the SN570 and, especially, the SN770. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,300MB/s | Sequential write speed: 6,000MB/s | NAND type: 3D TLC | TBW: 1,000TB However, from an engineering point of view, SSDs didn't needto be that big. The enclosure an SSD comes in has a lot of dead space inside. It's designed in that 2.5-inch size and shape to make the drive fit into those existing bays. So when mobile-device designers, challenged with slimming down laptops and tablets, reassessed this issue, the consensus was clear: The bulky 2.5-inch form factor, eventually, would have to go.

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

Crucial T700

Product listings are marketing fluff and BS sprinkled with plenty of concepts no regular user will even understand because they sound fancy (like TWD and ECC), they will list stuff that the average consumer can understand and relate to - capacity, speed (lots of megabytes per second, thousands of them, eye catchy), and maybe the interface because they have to (again, in an eye catching way like "SATA 6.0 Gb/s"). Even if there is a Q in the product model almost nobody cares about that. 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. 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 Flash memory prices have been on a downward trajectory for years. A decade ago, this trend was helping SSDs establish a foothold in the consumer market—largely for enthusiasts. Now, SSDs have taken over as the default storage medium for consumer PCs and further advances in flash memory are no longer pushing consumer SSDs into new product segments. Instead, cheaper flash is driving an increase in SSD capacity.

The SSD’s read speed stands at 3,480MB/s, while the write speed is 3,000MB/s, which will begin to throttle as it fills up. Most QLC-based SSDs typically use about one-fourth of their capacity as an SLC cache for the rest of the drive, which shrinks as more data is written, reducing speed significantly. But in the case of an 8TB SSD, this substantially decreases as the space available is pretty large. The five-year warranty isn’t exactly anything special (almost all the SSDs on this list come with a similar guarantee), but it’s just the cherry on top of an SSD that essentially has everything the average PS5 player will need for a very competitive price. 2. Crucial P5 PlusCapacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 6,600MB/s | Sequential write speed: 5,000MB/s | NAND type: Micron TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros: 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. 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.