SABRENT M.2 NVMe SSD 8TB, Internal Solid State 3300 MB/s Read, PCIe 3.0 2280, M2 Hard Drive High Performance Compatible with PCs, NUCs Laptops, and Desktops (SB-RKTQ-8TB)

Product Information

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. The drive’s 540 MB/s transfer rate is what one would expect from a SATA-based SSD, which, although much slower than NVMe, is way more enduring. Based on our findings, the drive inside seems to be a Micron 5210 Ion SSD, which has a similar data transfer rate as the Rapid. 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.

Going with anything less than 4TB with the 870 QVO will turn out to be a bad value as even TLC-based SATA SSDs without a powerful controller and DRAM cache will perform better in durability and transfer speeds. The main reason for QLC is that it makes 8TB a possibility and reduces the price-per-GB significantly to make it a worthwhile consideration. 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.) 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. Before you open your wallet, be sure to prepare for this drive: it requires a heatsink to reach its highest levels of performance. Unlike with the T700, Team does not offer a heatsink version of the Z540. The heatsink requirement mostly precludes it from use in a laptop, and you can choose from less expensive options for the PlayStation 5. In fact, there are many solid Gen 4 alternatives that are much more budget-friendly without some of the Z540’s downsides, like its poor power efficiency. But if you want the very best performance right now, look no further. 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 DriveSerial ATA is both a bus type and a physical interface. SATA was the first interface that consumer SSDs used to connect to motherboards, like the hard drives that preceded them. It's still the primary cable-based interface you'll see for 2.5-inch solid-state drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) 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 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. When buying an internal SSD to upgrade or augment a system you own, you need to start by figuring out what your system can actually accept: a 2.5-inch SATA drive only? Does it have an M.2 slot? What length of M.2 drive can it take, and using which bus type? If you're upgrading a laptop, in most cases you'll have the option only to swap out the internal drive, not to add another. If you can't get the info off the web beforehand, or from the manufacturer, you'll need (in most cases) to open up your laptop to see whether you have upgradable storage in the first place. (That is, if you can open it at all.) With laptop upgrades, you typically have much less flexibility than upgrading a desktop; your only option might be buying a drive in a higher capacity than the existing one, since you'll likely have only one M.2 slot or 2.5-inch bay to work with. ( See our favorite SSDs for laptop upgrades.) Some laptops, note, have the storage chips soldered down to the mainboard and aren't upgradable at all. 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.

The WD Red SN700 doesn’t offer anything special for the general user, but is great for use in a NAS. The underlying technology is also starting to show its age, but that maturity is important for critical storage systems like a NAS where performance isn’t as much of a focus. The WD Red SN700 also doesn’t have power loss protection, although that isn’t surprising as this drive isn’t for an enterprise application. However, the warranty and rated endurance are strong, which makes this a good buy for the right usage, which in this case is in a NAS. That said, those buying an SSD for professional applications such as filmmaking, server hosting, or anything else that involves large file transfers of the magnitude of hundreds of gigabytes daily will want to choose a drive that can withstand that kind of punishment for months, even years on end. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) The Intel 670p is an older driver, but it is also a proven budget option that is often on steep sale. It’s best to grab it at 1TB or 2TB, as the 512GB model is slower with a smaller pSLC cache. The drive has DRAM, which is nice, and it has the fastest QLC on the market, even now. Performance outside of the cache does not suffer as much as a consequence. The VectoTech Rapid is another external 8TB SSD that utilizes a SATA SSD in a custom enclosure that takes up very little space and is light enough to be carried around without hassle. It also uses a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface for data transfer, which we believe a majority of the devices manufactured support today.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.

Without getting too bogged down in the specifics, QLC is effectively 4-bit NAND. The original kind of NAND flash memory used in SSDs was single-level cell (SLC) which is able to hold one bit per cell. Multi-level cell (MLC) was then introduced to bump up density and lower pricing, offering two bits per cell. Then came triple-level cell and now quad-level cell, and there is even the spectre of penta-level cell on the horizon too. 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.) That said, with games in popular series like Call of Duty requiring over 100GB of space just for one title, the drive could end up full again faster than you can line up a sniper shot. These days, if you're looking to get just one roomy drive (or maybe you have to, such as for a laptop), 2TB is the recommended size for gamers, while hardcore content creators who are dealing with 8K RAW footage will need far, far more. (A one-hour 8K RAW file will occupy 7.92 terabytes of space.) (Credit: Molly Flores) Crucial'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. M.2 slots are now common in new desktop motherboards and practically universal in late-model laptops. M.2 solid-state drives are the 2.5-inch drive distilled to its essence, extremely minimal in their design and implementation. But they're also the most complicated to understand before you buy. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Samsung SSD 870 QVO

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. 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. As I said at the beginning, it's all about the QLC memory technology and why the Sabrent uses it better than any other QLC drive we've seen, even other NVMe SSDs.

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. 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

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. Random Read (4 KB, QD1) Up to 11,000 IOPS Random Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated The device supports Trim, secure erase, and S.M.A.R.T. data reporting like most SSDs. It also has multiple power states to help save power in mobile devices. Storing a larger amount of bits per cell is great for increasing SSD capacity but significantly reduces the drive’s endurance and write performance due to the larger amount of data being written per cell. To counter this, manufacturers will allocate a fraction (typically 1/4th) of the SSD to function as an SLC flash-based cache. However, on reaching the end of the SSDs limit, the cache is significantly reduced to free up space degrading the performance. NVMe Is Faster than SATA