Fast Drive (250 Mph)

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We also use the new SSDs as our main test drive for other component testing to see both how durable the drive is and how much or how little the drive's performance effects real life use cases like gaming, application loading, and operating system startup. How to choose the best SSD for you Generally, the higher a drive's capacity, the cheaper it will be per gigabyte. But that's not always true; sometimes the very highest-capacity drives come at a per-gigabyte price premium. The basement for budget external SSDs is currently about 7 cents per gigabyte, mostly from second- or third-tier vendors. Calculate your bottom-line price when comparing a host of drives. It’s also built to withstand working in extreme conditions, thanks to an ultra-rugged aluminium and rubber enclosure that’s IP68 dust and water resistant, 3m drop resistant and 4,000lb crush resistant. It is extremely pricey, but if you want the fastest, toughest drive in town, then you’re just going to have to pony up the dough.

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) It's not like most external SSDs need to be carried in both hands or a briefcase, but Kingston's XS2000 is positively tiny—0.5 by 1.3 by 2.7 inches and about an ounce, barely bigger than most USB flash drives yet offering up to 2TB of storage. It's also tough enough to earn an IP55 ingress protection rating against sand, dirt, or rain, though it shouldn't be immersed in water, and its USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface makes it faster than the average SSD. It's unlikely that your PC has a port that actually supports the Kingston's peak speed, however. Who It's For RUGGEDIZATION. The degree of ruggedness does vary from drive to drive, with drives like the ADATA SE800 leading the field at the moment among mainstream-price external SSDs. IP68 certification is a good spec to look for if you're serious about waterproof and dustproof drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)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.) We’ve yet to see better overall performance from a PCI-E 3.0 SSD, so for a significant upgrade on this, you’d need to spend even more on a PCI-E 4.0 model – and have an expensive, PCI-E 4.0-compatible motherboard in the first place. And this isn’t the only opportunity for the KC2500 to flaunt its premium status: thanks to its use of highly density, 96-layer NAND. The benefits of the 8GB NAND aren't always readily apparent since the drive effectively learns your most used applications and loads them faster. For games, it might help with initial load times after you've launched the game a few times. It's easy to get excited about the possibilities with this drive, but even a SATA SSD will still outpace it by a considerable margin.

The Samsung Portable SSD T9 is a high-performance external SSD, coming in capacities of up to 4TB and with an interface that supports USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which is blazing fast if you have a computer with a port that supports this standard (you can add a 2x2 expansion card to a desktop if need be). It was fast on our Windows testbed, which has a 2x2 expansion card, and surprisingly fast when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro with a Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 Gen 2 port. AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, the gold standard in civilian encryption solutions, and an upgraded Samsung Magician software suite sweeten the pot. Who It’s For 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) To be clear, what impresses most about the A2000’s speeds is not how high it can peak: we recorded a sequential read speed of 2,281MB/sec and a sequential write speed of 2,183MB/sec, both of which surpass Kingston’s own official figures but aren’t leading many tables more generally. Remember, however, that sequential speeds are rarely sustained in normal usage, and a lot of seemingly ultra-fast SSDs can slow to a crawl when faced with more trying transfers involving hundreds of non-sequentially stored files. The A2000 is special because, despite its lower price and apparently lower specs, it can maintain good speeds even in these much tougher conditions. It boasts exceptional read and write speeds; we recorded speeds of 286.8MB/s and 279.3MBps respectively in the 20TB iteration, based on testing via CrystalDiskMark, although This is roughly 10% faster than the previous 18TB drive and is sure to be beaten again by the newly launched 22TB iteration of the zippy HDD. 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.)Available with a SATA or SAS interface, it offers an unlimited drive write per day for five years (the length of the warranty) thanks partly to the use of SLC technology (which explains the price as well). A cheaper version of the Exadrive, the EDNLT064, is also available and is the second largest solid state drive on the market with a capacity of 64TB but swaps TLC for QLC. While you might be able to score a SATA SSD for pennies on the dollar right now, that's not always a good thing, since you still want quality to protect your files, and the Samsung 870 Evo is a great SSD for the job. It's not too expensive at higher capacities, and the 870 Evo can go as large as 4TB, which is great.

Since hard drives are mechanical devices that use mature technology, you can get relatively large amounts of storage capacity for the money. But the same tech that makes hard drives a tantalizing value becomes their biggest liability when used on the go. If you drop the drive, you could damage the interior mechanism and make your data inaccessible. By contrast, if you jolt an SSD while you're reading or writing data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable.Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.)

your opponents escape, defend their territory or want to destroy you, it depends on the mission you choose 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)The Corsair MP600 Pro LPX made waves in the SSD market when it launched with competitive pricing and unparalleled speeds, and that remains the case today. Its PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD credentials deliver lightning-fast speeds, outshining cheaper, slower PCIe 3.0 alternatives, and keeping up with the very best SSDs on the market. Some PCIe Gen 4 drives might appear similar in value but fall short in maximizing the bandwidth that the MP600 Pro LPX exploits.