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.

The combination of the Phison E18 controller and 176-layer TLC flash from Micron is a match made in heaven: unrivaled peak performance and, with the right cache design as on the Gaming model, strong sustained performance. That is ideal for workstation tasks, and Inland’s drives are cheaper than competitor offerings while maintaining a decent warranty. This is a barebones drive but will get the job done. 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.Right now, PCIe 4.0 is the go-to PCIe generation. That's because it offers a high speed at a reasonable cost. The newest SSDs on the market offer PCIe 5.0 capability, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth an SSD can run at. However, these are few and far between and awfully expensive. Also the first drives of any PCIe generation tend to end up much slower than what that generation is truly capable of.

For M2 SSD requirements for PlayStation® 5, please visit https://www.playstation.com/support/hardware/ps5-install-m2-ssd/ Yes, faster drives will be released to the market near the end of the year, but for now, the T700's 12.4 / 11.8 GB/s of throughput leads the market, not to mention the beastly up to 1.5 million random read/write IOPS that remains uncontested by any SSD on the market. The Crucial T700 can take a beating, too: The T700 doesn't lose as much steam as other drives during heavy sustained workloads, making it a suitable drive for even the heaviest of workloads, like workstation-class video editing. It improves game loading times courtesy of a so-called "read look-ahead" algorithm, which predictively caches game data. The XS70 is designed with PS5 compatibility in mind so the heatsink isn’t as bulky as some others you might come across. It really does look good. Admittedly I'm talking about an SSD here, and its not the kind of thing you'll spend time looking at, but Silicon Power's designers deserve credit.For most PC applications, that probably doesn't matter. But for small form factor rigs and perhaps a gaming laptop, every little can undoubtedly help. On that note, for most applications, we'd probably go for the cheaper bare drive rather than this more expensive model with its heat spreader. The revised SN850X is inherently a cooler-running thing, after all. The newest budget NVMe SSDs have undercut the pricing of mainstream drives on the slower SATA interface (which was originally designed for hard drives), but we shouldn't expect to see the end of SATA SSDs any time soon. 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. Pay for your phone and an inclusive bundle of calls, texts and data in one easy-to-manage monthly fee. Slightly less edifying are the P41's operating temps. At a 71°C peak, it's a little toastier than we'd ideally like. Not that we saw any signs of any thermal throttling. But temps that high is a teensy bit of a long-term reliability concern.