Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe 3.0, 3D NAND, NVMe, M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT4000P3PSSD8

Product Information

However, it's essential to note that the SN850 runs hot under load, so a heatsink is advised (which can increase its price), but it's a great option for PS5 owners and PC gamers alike. The first attempt was a new form factor called mini-SATA, or mSATA. The boiled-down essence of an SSD with the shell removed, an mSATA drive is a bare, rectangular circuit board. (Most mSATA drives relevant to upgraders measure about 1 by 2 inches.) mSATA drives fit into a special slot in a laptop's logic board or on a PC motherboard. As the name suggests, the slot is a conduit to the Serial ATA bus in the system. The interface on the drive end is an edge connector on the PCB, as opposed to the usual SATA cabling. The mSATA drive also draws all the power it needs through the slot. Hard drive retention: Hard drive retention is not available on models with a soldered hard drive, including XPS 9315 2in1, Chromebooks or Venue tablets, except the Venue 11 Pro. 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 John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY.

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. 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:Know which bus you're on.In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in. We also make sure to measure the SSD's heat and controller-reported data on how much data has been written to the drive and how much life the drive has left before failing to determine whether the manufacturer's claimed endurance measures up to the time the drive itself estimates it has left. Investing in an external SSD for gaming can hugely optimize your experience. Find the best PC, Xbox and PS4 external SSD that suits your needs, at Crucial All other products will be delivered via the fastest available method (excluding bank holidays and weekends) and generally within 3-5 days, depending on customer location. Of all the M.2 SSD's on this list, the Samsung EVO Plus is the most expensive, in some cases (against XPG SX8200, for example) by a good margin. If you have the money to spend and you want the fastest SSD your PCIe 3.0 board can handle, then you can't go wrong with the Samsung EVO Plus.

Having a dedicated workspace, setting priorities and eliminating distractions are just a few ways to increase productivity from home. 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. You want an SSD for PS5 with an excellent heatsink: The finned graphite design of Corsair's flagship NVMe SSD means it stays cool even under extreme loads. We actually like these because often, you often get a robust heat sink on the M.2 drive. Some PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained read/write tasks and throttle their speed. That said, unless you're running a server or something similar, where a drive is constantly getting hammered with reads and writes, that's usually not something you have to worry about. That's because many of these drives are so fast, they get their transfer duties done before they have a chance to get all that hot. 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.

Smaller-capacity 32GB and 64GB M.2 SSDs are also available for use in embedded applications or for SSD caching, but these are of marginal interest to upgraders or PC builders. Pricing on these drives ranges anywhere from 10 to 75 cents per gigabyte, and the biggest factor affecting price is the bus type of the drive. You want a super-fast drive: The SN850 has incredible read/write speeds that make it easy to launch games and copy over data.

Samsung's 990 Pro M.2 SSD garnered attention upon its announcement, primarily due to its adherence to the existing PCIe 4.0 standard instead of the anticipated PCIe 5.0. However, its performance, nearly maxing out the PCIe 4.0’s potential, silenced many naysayers. For gamers, it boasts unparalleled read speeds; for creative professionals, its write speeds shine, especially during intensive tasks. The Corsair MP600 Pro LPX's great performance and reasonable price make it a leading choice. The heatsink has been specially made with the PS5 in mind to help vent excess heat. In our testing, we found that the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX certainly lived up to its ambitions, scoring 7,364 MB/s reads and 6,870 MB/s. There are few models that can say the same, especially at the price point that the company's flagship drive retails for.Spends much of the review (& most of the conclusion) talking about how the 2TB model is able to get significantly more performance out of the new Phison E18 controller and as such, THAT'S the one you should buy... to then go and EXCLUSIVELY only show benchmark results of the 1TB drive in the review itself... -_- ... I am not amused.

The PNY XLR8 CS3140 M.2 SSD is one of the best SSDs around, both for gamers and PC enthusiasts alike. Available in three capacities—1TB, 2TB, and 4TB—this SSD is a great swan song for the PCIe 4.0 era as PCIe 5.0 SSDs start to roll out.

So, What Is an M.2 SSD?

What helps the Seagate FireCuda 530 stand out the most has to be its write endurance which is seriously high-level. You can expect around 1,275TBW for 1TB and 2,550TBW for 2TB and that's substantially higher than what you will find on many SSDs for PS5. Couple this with an excellent all-over heatsink and you've got a winning combination here. It's no longer quite the fastest, but it's still well worth slotting into your system at these prices.