It is also highly competitive in terms of pricing and the 4TB model offers a solid endurance rating of 2,960 TBW . Additionally, it ships with a heatsink suitable for the PS5. U.2 and mSATA: You may also stumble across mSATA and U.2 SSDs, but both motherboard support and product availability are rare for those formats. Some older Ultrabooks included mSATA before M.2 became popular, and drives are still available if you need them. SATA is slowest: SATA isn't as fast as an M.2 PCIe or a PCIe add-in card, but the majority of desktops and many laptops support 2.5-inch SATA drives, and many doing typical mainstream tasks users won't notice the difference between a good recent SATA drive and a faster PCIe model.

There are a few things to look out for, but most importantly you’ll want to focus on capacity, price, and warranty length. Three-year warranties are standard, but some nicer models are guaranteed for up to five years. And 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. Of course, SK Hynix isn't new to this space, but the new P41 is arguably the brand's first tilt at a truly high-end M.2 drive. The old SK Hynix Gold P31 was a bit of a clunky old thing, limited as it was to the PCIe 3.0 interface and a controller chip with a mere four memory channels. The new Platinum P41? It's got it all. Intel is a known brand, and their SSDs are generally reliable, with a strong warranty and good support. However, this drive now falls under the Solidigm umbrella and has been succeeded by the PCIe 4.0 P41 Plus. That drive is DRAM-less and feels more like a side-grade, but has also been priced aggressively. However, if you don’t need the bit of extra bandwidth and would prefer a drive with DRAM, the 670p is a solid choice for a budget PCIe 3.0 SSD, especially for laptops.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. When shopping for external storage, it’s also worth comparing the cost of a DIY alternative. Buying an affordable 4TB M.2 SSD and installing it in an M.2 PCIe/NVMe enclosure will often result in decent savings compared to branded external SSDs. It's in the real-world tests where the SN770 really struts its stuff. You'd be hard-pushed to tell the difference between this drive and much faster offerings in most day-to-day operations. Given this is the cheaper drive right now, that counts for a lot. The SN850 is the better drive if you need better performance, but you will pay considerably more. This was a very nice bump up from my last nvme drive (MyDigital BPX 240Gb). R/W speeds seem quite respectable for the storage/cost ratio this provides. I discovered my mainboard (Asus Prime B350M-E) does not see this in BIOS mode (ie. Legacy OPRom), but only when booting UEFI mode. I only ran up against that since I'm booting from this drive. I had to make the switch from using ol' GRUB-BIOS to something UEFI aware, I went with systemd-boot.

Adata’s XPG Gammix S70 Blade stands out in the crowd by using the somewhat unusual IG5236 “Rainier” controller from Innogrit. Although its random IOPS performance cannot compete with the class-leading Gen4 SSDs, sequential performance is very impressive at 7,400 MB/s (read) and 6,600 MB/s. At the affordable end of the spectrum – but still using the fast PCIe 4.0 interface – we find SSDs like the Crucial P3 Plus. This drive uses cheaper QLC NAND of the modern 176-layer variety but still offers an attractive mix of performance and value. Although its endurance rating is lower compared to the high-end alternatives, the P3 Plus ships with an industry-standard 5-year warranty, which is not always the case in the entry-level space.

Specifications

Corsair is more active than other manufacturers in the high-capacity space, with several drives on the market with confusingly similar designations. The MP600 Pro NH has a lot in common with the MP600 Pro XT, however, as they both use the Phison E18 controller and TLC NAND. There are also a few differences, most notably that the NH comes with no heat spreader and a more modest price tag. Sequential performance is also slightly behind at 7,000 MB/s (read) and 6,800 MB/s, but you get the same massive 6,000 TBW endurance rating with the 8TB model. The market has settled on 22mm wide as the standard for desktop and laptop implementations; the aftermarket drives available and the accessible slots we've seen have all been that width. The most common lengths we've seen are 80mm ("Type-2280") and 60mm ("Type-2260"). The lengthier the drive, the more NAND chips you can tend to stuff on it (plus, M.2 drives can be single- or double-sided), though know that length isn't an absolute measure of capacity. 42mm, 60mm, and 80mm M.2 SSDs (Credit: Intel) Launched in 2022, the Kingston KC3000 is among the fastest 4TB M.2 SSD at the time of writing. It is based on the Phison E18 controller and ultra-fast 176-layer Micron TLC NAND. These are the same parts as found in the Seagate FireCuda 530 (see below), but Kingston’s model seems to offer slightly better performance than the average E18 drive. Note that this drive is also available in a slightly faster version sold under the name Fury Renegade. Now, to reiterate an important point: A drive may come in the M.2 form factor, but that says nothing about the bus that it makes use of. Determining that is just as important as making sure it fits. I started using Steam, Origin, and some other distributors when I ran out of space on my single M.2 drive. The M.2 drive also had Windows and Office on it, and I was putting my system in some risk.