An SSD is now an essential component of a modern gaming PC. With your operating system and applications stored on an SSD, Windows will boot faster than you can grab a drink from the fridge. Applications will load in seconds. Once you’ve tried an SSD, you’ll never want to go back to a hard disk. So what makes an SSD the best? Striking the right balance between speed, reliability, and price. These are the best SSDs for your dollar.
Update 4/11/2016: The 850 Evo is the recommended SSD for most users, given the balance of price, performance, and capacity. The 850 Pro is the fastest SATA SSD, but if you're interested in paying more for a faster drive, you should consider an NVMe drive. Meanwhile, TLC is increasingly common in the budget sector, but outside of the 850 Evo, performance can be a real concern, so we recommend sticking with the 850 Evo or finding an MLC drive. Our previous budget recommendation, the BX100, is no longer in production and the replacement BX200 boasts worse performance.
The best SSD
What does the term 'best' mean, when talking about a storage device? Best value for money, great real-world performance, or a brilliant feature set? The ideal SSD for a gaming PC strikes that perfect price/performance/reliability balance, and manages this, and then some.
The technology behind the 850 Evo is similar in many ways to Samsung’s high-end 850 Pro. Samsung is the only SSD manufacturer that operates an entirely vertical business, owning the means of production for every aspect of its products. It designs the controller, programs the firmware, manufactures the NAND flash memory, and sells the finished product. Every other company is forced to rely on a third party for at least one of these aspects of its SSDs.
The advantage is closer collaboration between teams. When designing the controller, the engineers know exactly the type of NAND it will be used with. When writing the firmware, every last detail of the 850 Evo is known to the programmers.
The 850 Evo uses the same vertically arranged 3D NAND flash memory as in the 850 Pro. This arrangement allows for larger chip densities without having to go down the path of shrinking cell sizes, which begins to introduce problems that affect performance and reliability.
Samsung calls its proprietary 3D flash memory technology V-NAND, and has managed to stack 32 layers of flash cells on top of each other (and newer V-NAND is now capable of 48 layers). Each layer is connected to the next via unbelievably tiny wires, with a far greater number of connections between cells than you might expect from a 2D (planar) arrangement.
The 850 Evo is sold in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities, with prices on Amazon ranging from about $70 (£50) for the 120GB model, to around $290 (£228) for the 1TB, or $603 (£498) for the massive 2TB drive.
It’s not quite the most affordable SSD, but it’s around 20 percent less than the top-end Samsung SSD 850 Pro for example, and cheaper than SanDisk’s high-end model, the Extreme Pro. It’s probably best classed as a midrange drive, although if you look at the results table, you’ll see it outpaces more expensive drives in many tests.
Note: All the drives below are 240-256GB models except when specified.
In PCMark 8, the 850 Evo score tops 5000 points, beating nearly every other drive. Its read IOPS is near the top in the AS SSD benchmark, and it gets the best results in many of the sub-tests in PCMark 8. The sequential write speeds measured in CrystalDiskMark are some of the best too, and the read speed is nothing to complain about at all.
The 850 Evo offers excellent value for the money, and it's still a good performer. How has Samsung managed it, given that V-NAND is an ambitious undertaking that is more complex and expensive than standard flash memory? The answer is cheaper triple-level cell (TLC) flash memory. The 850 Evo is the first drive to combine TLC memory with a 3D flash arrangement, which is an interesting combination, vastly different from the planar MLC drives from other manufacturers.
But TLC flash memory has considerably worse performance and endurance than 2-bit MLC flash. Samsung gets around this major issue with what it calls TurboWrite, with a dedicated portion of the drive configured as SLC flash, acting as a cache. By only allowing each cell in the cache to hold a single binary value, this area has far greater endurance and reliability than the TLC portion, or even a standard 2-bit MLC drive. Samsung isn’t the only firm to do this. SanDisk has its own similar nCache 2.0 technology used on the Ultra II SSD and Extreme Pro.
All writes go to the SLC section first, and are quickly flushed to the TLC portion when the drive is idle. The size of the SLC cache is larger in the bigger 850 Evo capacities, with 3GB in the 250GB model, up to 12GB in the 1TB model.
In normal everyday use, you’ll never notice the SLC cache exists or see it impact performance. It only becomes apparent under extreme testing conditions where the 850 Evo doesn’t get a chance to flush the data, such as those conducted by AnandTech and other hardware review sites. According to AnandTech, when this happens you’ll see a more severe performance loss with smaller capacities. When writing to the TLC area, the 120GB 850 Evo drops to 150 MB/sec, the 250GB model to 300 MB/sec and the 500GB and 1TB models to 500 MB/sec and 520 MB/sec respectively. It’s worth stressing that filling up the SLC cache with a full-speed continuous write is not something you’ll do on a daily basis.
Endurance is barely affected by the use of TLC flash. With some firmware optimizations as well, the SLC cache reduces the number of writes to each TLC cell, boosting longevity. Samsung quotes 75TB of writes over five years for the 120GB and 250GB models, with 150TB for the 500GB and 1TB models. That’s a lot of writing, averaging to either 41GB per day, or 82GB per day, every day, for five years. Unless you're putting the 850 Evo through a ton of use, you won't go over this limit.
Another perk of Samsung's SSDs is its bundled Magician management software. It's very well designed, with easy access to SMART information, a benchmark tool, and a function to secure erase your SSD (which creates a USB boot disk). It also enables something called Rapid Mode, where a portion of your system memory acts as a cache for the SSD, so when you write a file, it can be written at speeds well in excess of 4GB/sec to system memory, then flushed to the SSD during idle periods. A chunk of your system memory is used up when it is enabled, so this is best used only if you have 16GB or more RAM in your PC. Rapid Mode looks great on benchmarks, but in real-world use its impact is smaller.
We tested two 850 Evo capacities. You’ll see from our benchmark results that it even eclipsed its bigger brother, the 850 Pro, by a tiny margin in a few tests, although the 250GB model comes out quite a bit slower in terms of IOPS and sequential read speeds.
It should also be noted that when talking about the SSDs, the performance differences between them are tiny. In the PCMark 8 trace benchmarks, rival brands are within 0.1 seconds. Some come out slightly ahead, some slightly behind, but these differences are so small, they're not worth losing sleep over.
Finally, we circle back to price. When we reviewed the 850 Evo SSD, we noted that it was a fantastic SSD that was just a bit too expensive to be our new favorite. Remember, when it comes to SATA SSDs, the performance differences are often barely noticeable. When it launched, the 250GB Samsung 850 Evo cost $140 on Amazon. , making it the new price/performance king. For most gamers, this is the SSD to get.
The best budget SSD
Update: The BX100 has been discontinued, with the replacement BX200 using TLC NAND and generally delivering worse performance. If you need to save money, the BX200 is one of the cheapest SSDs around, with prices as low as $100 for 480GB. Just don't expect it to handle heavier workloads that well.
For the budget category, the goal is simple: save as much money as possible without seriously compromising on real-world performance. If your budget is seriously restricted when building a gaming PC, it doesn’t matter how good the top-end drive is if it’s not affordable. Thanks to Crucial’s highly aggressive pricing with its latest SSD models, the hits a record level of affordability and therefore means even budget-constrained PC builds can have an SSD.
But the BX100 isn't our favorite just because it's absurdly cheap. Although in our synthetic tests the BX100 didn’t come out top in anything, it still performed reasonably well, with decent sequential read and write speeds. With the majority of the PCMark 8 trace results, which are better simulations of real-world performance, the BX100 is slower by only a fraction of a second. It’s barely noticeable.
In fact, if you were to sit in a blind test using two otherwise-identical computers, one with a BX100, and another with a more expensive SSD, it’s unlikely you’d ever be able to tell the difference. Windows will still boot quickly and applications will still load with lightning-fast, responsive performance. The performance difference between the BX100 and the most expensive Samsung SSD 850 Pro is far smaller than the difference between an SSD and running Windows from a hard disk.
The BX100 is available in the usual four capacities, with the 250GB model retailing for $99 on Amazon, cheaper than the Samsung 850 EVO or OCZ Arc 100, while very slightly outperforming the similarly affordable SanDisk Ultra II.
Micron, Crucial’s parent company, provides the 16nm 128Gbit NAND chips, while there’s a controller from a company called Silicon Motion, the SM2246EN, which is probably a bit cheaper than the Marvell controllers used in Crucial’s other models. Crucial has not resorted to TLC NAND flash memory here. It’s still 2-bit MLC.
Crucial has stripped a few features from the BX100 to hit this low price point, though. There’s no hardware encryption like you get with some SSDs, including Crucial’s older MX100 and the new MX200 drives, and no power-loss protection circuit. Neither of these are essential for gaming.
Endurance doesn’t seem to have taken a hit, as the BX100 is rated for 72TB of writes over five years, which again, will be hard to achieve unless you're constantly downloading, installing, deleting, and re-installing 40+ gigs games every single day.
With an affordable SSD like the BX100, larger capacities are a more realistic prospect. A is only $90 more than a 512GB Samsung SSD 850 Pro. Which is more useful: double the capacity, or a small improvement in benchmark results, which might not be even noticeable? It’s worth considering.
And nearly always, for the very best frame rates in games, you need a good GPU, so the money saved by opting for a more affordable SSD over one of the pricier models can be ploughed in to getting a more powerful graphics card. The result will (obviously) be better gaming performance than a less powerful GPU and a high-end SSD.
The best high-end SATA SSD
Update: If you have a motherboard with an M.2 PCIe slot, consider NVMe drives at the high-end of the spectrum. The 850 Pro remains the pinnacle of SATA performance, but SATA is a bottleneck on most of our current SSDs.
Samsung has reached the top spot in a second category in this SSD group test for a good reason. The is simply the fastest consumer SATA SSD money can buy.
It came out before the 850 Evo, and was the first consumer SSD to use V-NAND. Like the 850 Evo, the NAND flash memory is 40nm, with 32 vertical layers. However it doesn’t use TLC NAND: everything here is 2-bit MLC. There’s no need for an SLC cache then, which gives it a slightly higher formatted capacity. But the extra cost of V-NAND means a generally higher retail price than other SSDs. Only Plextor’s M6 Pro costs more on Amazon with a price of 50 cents per GB.
The 850 Pro uses a triple core MEX controller running at 400MHz, which is a step up from the 850 Evo’s dual-core MGX controller. As with the 850 Evo, we tested two capacities, 256GB and 512GB. The 512GB drive is slightly better value for money, although unlike nearly every other model, you don’t necessarily get much better performance by opting for a larger capacity drive, one of the possible effects of 3D NAND.
Looking at the results, the read IOPS results as recorded by the AS SSD benchmark are some of the best, a good 10-15 percent more than Crucial’s BX100, although the 500GB 850 Evo nudges ahead slightly in write IOPS. The same is true in some of the PCMark 8 traces. But its sequential speeds shows its true power, with over 540 MB/sec read and 510 MB/sec write speeds in CrystalDiskMark, a clear leap ahead of all the other drives.
And that’s why it’s our recommendation as the best high-end SSD. Do you really need to spend the extra money on a high-end SSD, though? Our recommendation is no.
In nearly all real-world situations, there’s not a huge benefit to using a Samsung 850 Pro over a cheaper SSD. It costs quite a bit more and that money is better spent on more system memory, a faster GPU, or a better CPU. Or, say, a 1TB SSD instead of a 500GB one.
But if you’re building the ultimate rig, and want the very best possible performance in any situation, without worrying about the cost, then it’s the 850 Pro you should choose. In a gaming PC, the extra performance won't be especially beneficial. But for really demanding non-gaming tasks, such as 4K video editing, you’ll want to know you’re getting the very best, and the 850 Pro provides this. The endurance of the MLC memory will also guarantee the drive lasts a long time.
What about the competition? The high-end SSD market is proving less popular for manufacturers, thanks to the low prices Crucial, OCZ, and others are applying to the low end. The SanDisk Extreme Pro and Plextor M6 Pro are two of the only drives that really compete with the 850 Pro, although the Crucial MX200 puts in such a good show, it’s also worth considering.
Just like the 850 EVO, Samsung’s Magician software is included with the Pro, with Rapid Mode, so when it’s turned on, all writes go to system memory, an effective ramdisk, rather than the 850 Pro itself. This can make a difference to performance, but as we said before, you’ll need a good quantity of system memory.
Worthy of note is the ten-year warranty supplied with the 850 Pro. As the drive is rated for 150TB of writes, that equates to 80GB per day for five years, or 40GB a day for ten years, which is certainly enough for workstation use. But you probably won't want to be using the in another 10 years, as storage technology (and speeds) will have moved far beyond the limitations of current SATA controllers.
How we tested SSDs and others we tested
SSDs make your whole system faster and more pleasant to use. But they matter for gaming, too. A fast-loading SSD can cut dozens of seconds off the loading times of big games like Battlefield 4, or MMOs like World of Warcraft. An SSD won't affect framerates like your GPU or CPU, but it will make installing, booting, dying, and reloading in games a faster, smoother process. When shopping for a good SSD for gaming, one of the most important factors is price per gigabyte. How much will you have to spend to keep a healthy library of Steam games installed, ready to be played at a moment's notice?
To find the best gaming SSDs, we researched the SSD market, picked out the strongest contenders, and put them through their paces with several benchmarking tools. We also put in the research to know what makes a great SSD great, beyond the numbers—technical stuff like types of flash memory and memory controllers.
To be clear, this article only covers 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, the standard internal drives most PC gamers are accustomed to. There are newer, faster SSD form-factors (M.2 and PCie) that can deliver far greater performance than SATA drives. But right now, there are very few of them, motherboard support is limited, and they tend to be far more expensive than SATA SSDs. M.2 will likely be much bigger by 2016, and we'll update this article when appropriate.
Testing SSDs
To test the SSDs, we used a PC with a 4GHz Intel Core i7-4790K, 16GB of DDR3 memory, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, and an Asus Z87 motherboard. Windows 7 was installed on the main system drive, AHCI was enabled, and all the drives were connected to the motherboard’s SATA III ports. We used a combination of synthetic and trace benchmarks. This included AS SSD, CrystalDiskMark, and PCMark 8, which runs a set number of timed traces of popular applications.
SSD Technology
The single specific advantage that makes an SSD so much faster than a hard disk is exponentially shorter access time. A hard disk depends on a mechanical arm moving into position to read data from a platter, while in an SSD, data is stored and accessed electronically. Although modern hard disks are astonishingly fast at accessing data, they’re no match for an SSD.
An SSD is a physically simple device. It’s made from an array of flash memory chips and a controller, which comprises a processor, memory cache, and firmware. But like most things in computing, it starts to get complicated when you look at it in more detail. NAND flash chips store binary values as voltage differences in non-volatile memory, meaning they retain their state when power is cut off. In order to change the state of a single cell, in effect, writing to it, a strong voltage is applied to it. But because of the way the cells are laid out, it can’t be done on a cell-by-cell basis: an entire row has to be erased at once.
Each cell is insulated from its neighbours to preserve the value it holds. But every time a cell is written to, the insulator becomes slightly less reliable. Eventually, after a certain number of writes, the cell becomes unable to hold any values, which is why SSDs have a limited lifespan. In the early days of flash memory, this limited number of writes was a concern, but clever tricks, improved technology, and software improvements means it’s no longer a real issue.
If you want further proof, then have a gander at the SSD endurance experiment over on TechReport. In one of the only tests of its kind, they set about continuously writing data to select SSDs, until the drives became completely unusable, in a test that went on for months. Although the odd bad sector crops up relatively early, at 100TB of writes, most of the drives survived until nearly a petabyte of data or more was written to them, far beyond the manufacturers’ rating, and it took months of non-stop writing to reach that point.
The best drives managed 2.5PB of writes. It’s fair to say endurance for all but the most extreme workload is no longer an issue.
SLC, MLC, and TLC memory
A given quantity of physical flash memory cells can be programmed to hold either one, two or three bits of data. A drive where each cell holds a single bit is known as SLC. Each cell can only be in one of two states, on or off, and only needs to be sensitive to two voltages. Its endurance and performance will be incredible but a large amount of flash memory is needed to provide a given capacity, so SLC drives have never really taken off beyond expensive server and workstation setups.
2-bit MLC memory is currently the most popular kind used in consumer SSDs. Each cell holds two values, with four binary states (00, 01, 10 and 11), so the cell needs to be sensitive to four voltages. The same amount of flash memory provides double the amount of space, so less is needed and the SSD is more affordable.
3-bit TLC memory goes even further, with three values per cell. Now each cell has to hold eight binary states, and performance and endurance begins to really suffer as there are eight distinct voltages that represent data. A TLC cell will be erased more often, and therefore wears out quicker. And since it needs to hold eight voltage values, reading them reliably requires more precision. But you get even more capacity from the same amount of flash memory, resulting in even cheaper SSDs, which is something everyone wants.
As we’ve found from testing some SSDs, manufacturers are using tricks to mitigate these negative effects with TLC flash memory, so prices can continue falling without impacting performance.
Sequential Transfer Speeds
Whenever you read about an SSD, or look at a review, the first figure you’ll usually see is a headline-grabbing transfer rate. Read and write speeds up to around 500MB/sec, or even faster in the case of a PCI-Express SSD. These numbers always look really impressive. This will certainly be referring to sequential file transfer rates, which means the speed a storage device can read or write a file if all the blocks are laid out one after the other.
In the real world, most software applications deal with both large and small files, while at times, a program might be waiting for input before it carries on, so you’ll never be getting the maximum sequential speed of your SSD all the time. You might see these speeds when writing a large 10GB movie file, but things will be a lot slower when copying a folder full of 10,000 jpeg images, or HTML documents. These smaller files could be spread all over the disk, and will be slower to transfer.
In the case of a hard disk, that entails moving the disk head over the correct position on the platter, which adds a really long delay. SSDs are far quicker to do this, which is where the real improvement in overall responsiveness comes from.
To further complicate things, some SSDs handle uncompressed data much faster than compressed data. Specifically, there has been a big difference in performance with these two types of data with SSDs that use older SandForce controllers. If there’s a difference, the faster speeds when dealing with uncompressed data are the ones that are quoted. Therefore, although faster sequential speeds are always better to see, it’s best not to judge an SSD on these figures alone, as you’ll never get these speeds all the time.
IOPS
IOPS is another term that is often used in relation to performance of storage products, usually quoted with SSD specifications, but its direct application to real-world use isn’t simple. Put simply, IOPS means input-output operations per second. The more a device can manage, the faster it is. Except, not all IO operations are the same. Reading a tiny 512-byte text file isn’t the same thing as writing a 256KB block from a 10GB movie.
There’s no standard for how figures should be advertised, but the general agreed format is that companies quote the QD32, 4KB block size figure, that is the IOPS when 32 4KB read or write commands are queued. In the real world, applications won’t be constantly queuing up 32 4KB blocks. It will likely be a random mixture of block sizes, reads, writes, and times when the storage device is idle.
Much effort goes into measuring IOPS for patterns that simulate databases, web servers, file servers and so on. For gaming, it really depends on the application, since no two games will be identical. Some might involve huge textures being loaded from disk, while others might be structured differently. Although the 4K QD32 IOPS figure is relevant, it’s best thought of as an indicator of SSD performance rather than a definitive, comparable benchmark for overall performance.
Competitors
We narrowed our testing down to 9 SSDs by researching the most popular and competitive drives around. Of course, there are plenty of other SSDs out there, and new ones arriving regularly, like the , which may end up being a good competitor for the high-end Samsung 850 Pro. We focused on SSDs known to be reliable, consistent performers, and the best value options.
Looking at the benchmark results, and particularly the PCMark 8 traces, it’s not exactly obvious that one SSD seriously outperforms another in real-world tests. Even the differences between drives in synthetic benchmarks are fairly narrow, with differences of ten percent or so. Even if you buy an SSD that's not included in our testing, it will be far faster than a mechanical hard drive—it just might not quite match the speed and endurance of a drive like the .
At the high end, it seems clear that the SATA bus is now the serious limiting factor in SSD performance. Fortunately, SSD manufacturers can take advantage of the PCI-Express bus, and much faster speeds, with a new standard called M.2, which I’ll explain in a moment.
But even the affordable SSDs are really good. Sure, they might be a bit slower in synthetic benchmarks, but in real-world tests, you'll find little reason to complain about their performance.
For the entry-level choice, it was a close call between and the . As of this writing, the Ultra II has a lower retail price, but it’s based on TLC flash, and it came out ever so sightly lower in the benchmark results. We went with Crucial’s offering, but if you end up with an Ultra II in your PC, you won’t be disappointed. OCZ’s Arc 100 is also absolutely fine, but its retail price pushes its price per GB slightly above Crucial and SanDisk’s SSDs.
Intel’s 730 series SSD has been on the market a while, and has been surpassed by the firm’s PCI-Express 750 series drive, which is a lot more up to date, but frankly, we’d ignore the 730, for its pricing is just not good value for money, and its write speeds suffer compared with Samsung, Crucial, or Plextor’s drives.
Similarly, Kingston’s V300 is a bit old now, and it too has similarly poor synthetic write results and wasn’t quite as good, despite its affordability.
At the high end, Samsung’s competition comes from Plextor’s M6 Pro and SanDisk’s Extreme Pro (which we unfortunately didn't get a sample of for testing). 3D NAND is definitely the future, as it makes a big difference to performance and endurance, and Samsung certainly has an advantage here. The Magician software helps too: it’s the best SSD software going, and its Rapid Mode feature works well. Samsung might not have this advantage forever. Just recently, Intel and Micron announced a partnership to develop 3D NAND, with 48-layer chips coming soon, although products might not be with us until 2016. Intel promises SSDs with up to 10TB of capacity, thanks to this extra chip density, which admittedly sounds quite amazing, and is likely to cause serious concern for hard disk manufacturers.
For the best choice for an SSD, we chose Samsung’s SSD 850 Evo because it both performs superbly and is excellent value for money. In fact, the price per GB of the 500GB 850 Evo model works out better value than any of the 256GB drives. Being based on TLC flash memory doesn’t seem to hold it back at all, and 3D NAND clearly makes a big difference to performance.
However, it’s worth pointing out that gives it a run for its money, and is better value too for the 256GB model. It certainly qualifies as a close runner up.
Now that an SSDs are such good value, there's simply no reason not to have one for your PC. If you were an early adopter with a 64GB or 128GB drive and find that capacity to be rather limiting, it might be time to consider an upgrade. A 512GB SSD now costs a lot less than a 128GB model did a few years ago.
Future testing: M.2, PCI-Express and NVMe
Standard 2.5-inch SSDs are fundamentally limited by the speed of the SATA III bus, which has a maximum theoretical throughput of 6 Gbit/sec. In real world terms, the performance ceiling is around 550 MB/sec for an SSD, and it’s becoming obvious that this is imposing a serious limit on flash memory technology.
The solution is to switch to the PCI-Express bus, which offers 500 MB/sec per lane, with a x4 card allowing for up to 2 GB/sec. But unfortunately, all PCI-Express SSDs to date are really expensive, and being in a PCI card format is quite limiting. You may have issues fitting one in a tiny case, and you can’t transfer it to a laptop if you upgrade your desktop PC in the future, for example.
There are alternatives: SATA Express runs at 10 Gbit/sec, a small improvement, and for ultra-thin laptops, there’s mSATA, which runs at the same speed as SATA III but reduces the size of the SSD.
What’s on the horizon looks promising: a new format called M.2, which can use either the PCI-Express, USB or SATA bus and squeezes the size of SSDs down even further. If you have an up-to-date motherboard with an Intel Z97 or X99 chipset, you’ll probably have one of these slots. It’s less probable that you actually own an M.2 device though.
The size of M.2 devices is denoted with a number, specifying the card’s width and length. For SSDs, this is normally 22mm wide and either 60mm, 80mm or 110mm long. Unfortunately, the number of M.2 SSDs on the market is quite slim right now. And many of them use the old SATA bus rather than take advantage PCI-Express.
But times are changing, and there are some really promising new models on the horizon. One example is Kingston’s Hyper X Predator, which runs at PCI-Express x4 speeds, and comes in an interesting package. A PCI card is supplied with an M.2 connector on it, so you can just plug it into any old desktop PC motherboard. If you have an M.2 slot, or a computer (like a laptop) without PCI-Express slots, the SSD can be removed from the card and plugged in. A neat idea. Plextor's M6e is one of the only affordable current x2 PCIe models, and Plextor will have a follow-up x4 drive in 2015, too.
There’s another old standard that’s holding back SSD performance: AHCI. The original host protocol for communicating with storage devices was designed at a time when everyone used hard disks, and certain assumptions were made regarding latency and performance. It limits what can be done with SSDs. AHCI has now been replaced by NVMe, which lifts those limits. For example, the maximum number of IO commands has gone from 32 to 65536. Booting from NVMe is not supported by the vast majority of motherboards, however. Only newer boards enable it, again based on Intel’s latest chipsets.
Some NVMe SSDs are starting to hit the market. Intel’s brand new PCI Express 750 series is one such SSD, and from early reviews it seems to be a lot faster than any 2.5-inch SATA SSD. We'll be checking out PCIe and M.2 SSDs as they become available.
In another 10 years, solid state technology may make today's SATA SSDs look like floppy disks. But for now, SATA SSDs still offer the best performance you're going to get for your dollar, and the is currently the best choice for a great gaming SSD.
A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to stores like Amazon. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which helps support our work evaluating PC components.
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