Seagate BarraCuda, 4TB, Internal Hard Drive, 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s, 5,400 RPM, 256MB Cache, for Computer Desktop PC, FFP (ST4000DMZ04)

Product Information

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.) When expanding your PS5’s storage, you’ll want to grab an SSD that fits the console’s internal M.2 port rather than a USB drive, as PS5 games can’t be played from an external drive. And while installing one of the best SSDs will require some work, you don’t need to be a hardware aficionado. Still, it’s impressive, and if you’re tempted don’t be won over by the cheaper non-heatsink model. The absence of thermal distribution will limit the read and write speeds the SSD can sustain. If you’re going to reach for the moon, you may as well as splash the cash to get there. 4. Seagate FireCuda 530 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) A further wrinkle around the PCIe bus: All recent drives and slots support a transfer protocol known as NVMe (for Non-Volatile Memory Express). NVMe is a standard designed with flash storage in mind (opposed to the older AHCI, which was created for platter-based hard drives). In short, if you want the fastest consumer-ready SSD, get one with NVMe in the name. You'll also need to be sure that both the drive and the slot support NVMe. (That's because some early M.2 PCIe implementations, and drives, supported PCIe but not NVMe.) (Credit: Molly Flores)

Unless you’re a real technical enthusiast, however, you don’t need to worry about these details. The best way to compare drives is to look directly at real-world performance: for the drives reviewed below, we’ve measured this using the popular AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark benchmarks. What happens if my hard disk fails? The SATA interface is capable of sequentially reading and writing a theoretical maximum of 600MBps in an ideal scenario, minus a bit for overhead processes. Most of our testing has shown that the average SATA drive tops out at roughly 500MBps to 550MBps; in sequential tasks, the real-world difference between the best SATA drive and a merely average one is pretty small. The ever-decreasing price of solid state drives (SSDs) means that traditional hard disks are less commonplace than they once were. However, as media libraries grow larger, and 4K video becomes commonplace, there’s still a role for affordable, high-capacity storage – and that’s where hard drives are at their strongest. is a huge data capacity and will allow you to store everything your family can throw at it. Hundreds of albums of family photos and home movies can sit comfortably alongside your ever-expanding film and music collection. Hours Upon Hour Of VideoThe Seagate Skyhawk AI HDD is designed with “AI'' firmware to improve the drive’s ability to handle recording, video analysis, and GPU analytics workloads. This includes up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams with zero dropped frames. This is combined with a robust warranty, including a high workload rate and Seagate’s three-year data recovery service. We sell a wide range ofhigh qualityenterprise HDD’sproduced by both Seagate (BarraCudaPro)and WD (Gold). The PNY XLR8 gaming kit is more peculiar than other PS5 SSDs. Included is the PNY XLR8 SSD, which boasts a respectable 7,500 MB/s read speed and 5,650 MB/s write speed. But the real draw is the bespoke heatsink mounted to the underside of a plastic shield that replaces the PS5’s original SSD slot cover.

An SSD metric called terabytes written (TBW) refers to the point where, after a certain amount of data being written to the drive, its cells will begin to fail, meaning the available space on the drive will shrink as the drive electronics compensate and take the failing cells offline. The TBW rating of a drive is usually anywhere between 100TBW and 3,500TBW, depending on the manufacturer, the capacity, and the use case, but for the most part this isn't a figure that will affect daily users. A hybrid drive is a regular hard disk that features a small built-in SSD, which it uses to accelerate performance. It works by learning which files you access frequently and caching these in the high-speed solid-state storage. Since it’s all handled silently by the drive controller, it’s very hard to say anything with confidence about what sort of performance benefit you’ll really see. What’s certain is that the drive won’t be able to cache all of Windows and your frequently used applications, so you won’t experience performance that’s as good as you’d see from a regular SSD. For performance, HDDs are also often gauged by rotations per minute (RPM), which is usually a direct indicator of performance. The RPM value impacts sequential transfers as well as random access latency. Lower RPM drives tend to be quieter and more efficient, while higher RPM drives have better performance. There are also variable RPM drives that try to achieve the best of both worlds. Power draw, heat, and noise are factors related to performance. 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. Ebuyer's collection of 4TB internal drives are engineered by trusted manufacturers to deliver quality performance while emitting the lowest levels of waste noise and heat.

So, Which Internal SSD Should I Buy?

The maximum sequential read speed that's theoretically possible for a SATA drive is 600MBps, though as we said above, we haven't seen any drives reach that limit even in ideal testing conditions. The theoretical peak sequential read speed for PCI Express 3.0 x4 drives is much faster—3,940MBps, although the fastest one we've tested in-house is the Samsung SSD 870 EVO, which topped out at 3,372MBps read speed in the Crystal DiskMark 6 benchmark. The five-year warranty isn’t exactly anything special (almost all the SSDs on this list come with a similar guarantee), but it’s just the cherry on top of an SSD that essentially has everything the average PS5 player will need for a very competitive price. 2. Crucial P5 Plus