At this point there's a SSD for your every storage need whether you're looking to completely eliminate loading times or have affordable bulk space. Hard drives still have their place for storing media and game backups, but at this point your gaming PC or any computer should have a solid-state drive running as its boot drive. Even consoles have made the switch to SSDs and you can add install the shelf M.2 drives on your PS5 to expand your storage space.
There's a wide variety of SSDs available with different transfer speeds, NAND types, and at all varying prices. It's a lot to figure out but that's why we're here to present you only the best SSDs. Whether you're gaming or just want a fast, reliable startup disk, these are the drives you need. Also, we'll help you understand storage specification if you're looking for something outside our recommendations – click here to see them in the UK.
TL;DR – These are the Best SSDs:
- Crucial P5 Plus
- WD Blue SN570
- WD Black SN850
- WD_Black SN770
- Samsung 980
- Corsair MP600 Pro XT
- Samsung 980 Pro
- Samsung 870 QVO
- Corsair MP600 Pro Hydro X Edition
- Seagate FireCuda 530
1. Crucial P5 Plus
Best SSD
The Crucial P5 Plus offers fast speeds with solid endurance and even better value. With its 1TB of storage space and 6,600MB/s sequential read speed, it packs a powerful punch all for under $150, making it our top choice for the best SSD. This NVME SSD has PCIe 4.0 technology, making it much faster than drives with PCIe 3.0 technology. And, while costing slightly more, it edges out other drives on our list like the WD_Black SN750 SE and Samsung 980.
This SSD is perfect for hardcore gamers, creative content creators, or those with intensive workloads. Additionally, Crucial P5 Plus meets the minimum spec requirements to work with the PS5 when used with heat sink. The advanced controller technology and Micron Advanced 3D NAND will make the device faster, hold more information, run more efficiently, and use less energy. Plus, the Crucial P5 offers a warranty of 5-years or 600 total drive writes. For your next gaming PC build, it's the perfect part to go with any affordable CPU and motherboard.
2. WD Blue SN570
Best Budget SSD
Western Digital gives you a lot of bang for the buck with the Blue SN570. Priced under $90, this SSD offers some solid read speeds at 3,500 MB/s, making it run faster than some of the best SATA SSDs. Therefore, you should have limited PC lag and load times. This 1TB SSD uses PCIe 3.0 technology, which is not the fastest that is currently available, but at this price point, it can’t be beaten.
The WD Blue SN750 also offers a good deal of reliability thanks to features that protect your content. There is a dashboard available in order to monitor the health of your drive, plus you can see available space and the temperature. The warranty of 5 years or 600 total drive writes, which is often the standard, means that you can have peace of mind that this small investment will last. And, since you saved a bit of money here, you can spend more elsewhere on your PC build.
3. WD Black SN850
Best Gaming SSD
WD has stepped up its game with the WD Black SN850. This upgrade from the SN750 makes the leap from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0, and it comes with the speeds to match. Whereas the old drive could offer sequential reads of almost 3,500MB/s, the SN850 fully doubles that to 7,000MB/s. That comes alongside 5,300MB/s write speeds. These are speeds to rival Samsung's 980 Pro SSD.
The WD Black SN950 uses 96-layer, TLC 3D NAND, and it delivers a fairly reasonable price for a 1TB drive without making the sacrifice to longevity that comes from going for QLC NAND. With the incredible speeds of the WD Black SN850, you'll be ready to dive into games in an instant. And, with Microsoft's Direct Storage letting data move from SSDs directly to graphics cards, you'll want to ensure your SSD doesn't become a bottleneck.
4. WD_Black SN770
Best SSD Boot Drive
If you want to limit the time you wait for your PC to turn on and all your applications to load, a great boot drive is a must. It should be relatively fast and roomy. This makes the WD_Black SN770 with a 1TB capacity a great option. It offers compelling speeds with fast sequential reads at 5,150 MB/s and writes at 4,900 MB/s. This is 40% faster than the last-gen, WD_Black SN750 SE. Plus, during random operations, where your operating system will likely feel its speeds the most, it still keeps up a solid performance. Another perk is this drive has considerable endurance at up to 600 full drive writes, or 600TBW for the 1TB model.
The WD_Black SN770 is a bit more affordable than its faster counterpart, the WD_Black SN850, so you’ll be able to spring for the larger 1TB capacity, or if you need more space, you can grab the 2TB model. This means the drive should maintain its peak performance for longer as long as you don't fill it completely with files and media. And, where you’ve saved a bit of money on a quality boot drive, you can then spend a bit more on a dragster to handle large file transfers or your game library.
5. Samsung 980
Best NVMe SSD
If your system isn't able to take advantage of the latest PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives, then you don't need to sink the extra cash it takes to get one of them. Instead, you can pick up the newly released Samsung 980 SSD. This is the PCIe 3.0 counterpart to the PCIe 4.0-based Samsung 980 Pro SSD.
What you get from this drive is more or less a continuation of what Samsung had already been offering in this market segment with the Samsung 970 Evo and 970 Pro. You'll find serious speeds around every corner with 3,500MB/s sequential reads and 3,000MB/s sequential writes. Random read and write operations are also cruising along at a fast clip. And, though it's not a major leap up compared to the 970 Evo, Samsung claims it has improved power efficiency by 32% and reduced heat by 50%. And, one big perk of this new drive is how much lower the price has gotten, as it costs just $130 for a terabyte.
6. Corsair MP600 Pro XT
Best M.2 SSD
The Corsair MP600 Pro XT provides you with a bunch of storage thanks to its 1TB capacity, and it’ll let you access any of your files or games incredibly fast. This drive can reach a peak sequential read speed of 7,100MB/s when you insert it into a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot on your motherboard, so you’ll want to make sure you find an open slot for it to take full advantage of its impressive speeds. Though it’s not leading the class, it also offers remarkable write speeds, so you can move your files to it quickly and make them more accessible.
This’ll be a solid drive if you want your game library to launch quicker and deliver assets to your graphics card faster, especially if you have an RTX card capable of using RTX IO with Microsoft’s DirectStorage. If you’re shuffling content onto and off of the drive a lot or using it as a scratch disk, you’ll also benefit from the drives extensive durability, which can see it completely rewritten 700 times.
7. Samsung 980 Pro
Best PCIe 4.0 SSD
The champ has finally done it. Samsung often leads the field when it comes to SSDs, particularly since it designs its own NAND flash and DRAM cache. And, now the Samsung 980 Pro is here to push things even further forward as Samsung's big foray into the PCIe 4.0 space. This new PCIe SSD tops our previous pick by offering a drive that can offer a whopping 1TB of storage and deliver read speed up to 7,000MB/s and write speeds up to 5,000MB/s.
The best part? The Samsung 980 Pro is offering all that at just a bit over $200. It's not the cheapest price per GB, but cheaper drives aren't going to be nearly as fast. This'll be the drive you want for future PC games that can take advantage of Microsoft's DirectStorage API for super-fast transfers of game assets directly over to your graphic card's memory or as additional storage for your PS5.
8. Samsung 870 QVO
Best SATA SSD
Samsung already had a strong value proposition for SATA SSDs with its 860 QVO, which offered up fairly substantial storage at a lower price thanks to its use of QLC flash storage. Now, Samsung is continuing that offering with the 870 QVO. These SSDs muster a little bit of extra speed, reaching for the maximum throughput SATA can even handle. While speeds are definitely not as impressive as those found on even budget PCIe NVMe SSDs, the price-per-gigabyte of the Samsung 870 QVO is compelling. If you want a lot of storage on an SSD, this is the way to go.
Samsung's 4TB 870 QVO costs a tidy $499. While it's usually true that the more you get of something the less you pay for each one, that hasn't held true for capacious SSDs, but this time Samsung is making it economical to go for the bigger option. That means you can readily fit a massive amount of fast storage in a tiny space without breaking a budget. Samsung also has a 1TB and 2TB version available, and an 8TB model is coming soon. The specs vary slightly between models, with different warranties and DRAM cache sizes being most notable. In any case, there are few more compelling options for switching away from SATA hard drives than these SSDs.
9. Corsair MP600 Pro Hydro X Edition
Best Liquid-Cooled SSD
What's better than a fast SSD? An extra-fast SSD that has extreme cooling to ensure heat never slows it down. That's what Corsair aims to offer with the Corsair MP600 Pro Hydro X Edition. This takes Corsair's MP600 Pro SSD, which is already a fast drive, and attaches a water block to it so it's ready for your liquid-cooled gaming rig.
The drive itself delivers high speeds thanks to its use of the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. It can offer sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 6,550MB/s respectively. Since this drive comes in a spacious 2TB capacity, you won't have to worry about needing to upgrade it anytime soon. Another reason you won't have to upgrade too soon is thanks to the drive's extreme endurance, which has it rated for a total of 1,400 TBW.
10. Seagate FireCuda 530
Fastest SSD
One of the main reasons for snagging an SSD over other storage options is the insane speeds offered, so why not grab one of the fastest ones out there? The Seagate FireCuda 530 takes advantage of PCIe Gen4, bringing you transfer speeds two times faster than the PCIe Gen3 and twelve times faster than SATA SSDs. We’re talking 7,300MB/s read speeds, making all your apps and games run smoother and quicker. Plus, with 6,000MB/s write speeds, all of your saves will be a breeze.
The FireCuda 530 is a speed demon thanks to the 3D TLC NAND technology used in its design. This gives it more endurance while also lowering the power consumption. That, combined with the built-in heatsink to ensure speeds are maintained even when working overtime, makes you hard-pressed to find a faster drive. You can also pack it full of files thanks to the 1TB of storage. And if you’re looking for a drive to slide into your PS5’s M.2 slot, the FireCuda 530 meets its specs for performance and dimensions.
Where to Get the Best SSD in the UK
What to Look in for an SSD?
Whereas $500 used to buy you a 128GB or 120GB SSD with you can now buy a 4TB Samsung 860 QVO for roughly the same amount of money and kiss hard drives goodbye forever. What's more SSDs are insanely fast with sequential read and write speeds that start at 500MB/s and peak at 5,000MB/s if you're looking at the latest NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives.
Alternatively, cheap and fast SSDs like the WD Blue SN550 and Adata XPG SX6000Pro allow anyone building a new PC to use an NVMe SSD as their main drive
Before you buy a solid-state drive though, you need to know what kind of SSD you want. Newer motherboards have sockets for M.2 drives, which are long, flat sticks of storage that lie flat against the motherboard. If you don’t have that in your system, you can buy a 2.5-inch drive that uses power and data cables just like an HDD.
Now things get a bit more varied once we start talking about connectors. For starters, M.2 drives might utilize a PCI Express- or Serial ATA (SATA)-based interface. The former delivers incredibly high transfer speeds up to 4,000MB/s, meanwhile, SATA is limited to a maximum 600MB/s speed. 2.5-inch drives are the other form of solid-state storage you’ll find and they mostly utilize a SATA connection.
The next major thing you should know about is ‘NVMe’ and it stands for the Non-Volatile Memory Express technology. That’s a mouthful, but it’s basically a communications standard, which allows SSDs connected over PCI Express to operate more like fast memory than storage. If you're shopping around for a solid-state drive from this category you'll want something that achieves at least a 2,000MB/s sequential read/write speed.
M.2 drives aren’t the only type of drives that can tap into this wickedly fast PCIe NVMe connection. For example, there are solid-state drives like the Intel Optane 905P that connect directly into the PCIe slot on motherboards. Alternatively, you may also find some 2.5-inch drives that utilize a U.2 connection and operate just as fast as the best NVMe SSDs, though, these are becoming increasingly rare.
NAND Types
Almost all SSDs are made up of NAND flash memory, but they don't necessarily use the same type. in fact, the market is currently made up of four types of NAND memory—with SLC, MLC TLC, and QLC variants—and the big thing that separates them all is how their underlying cells store the 1's and 0's that make up your data. Let's take a quick look at what makes each type of NAND memory tick
- SLC: short for single-level cells, this is the original form of NAND memory and arguably the best. SLC is designed to only accept one bit per memory cell, which makes them the fastest, most durable and reliable, and often also the most expensive.
- MLC: Multi-Layer Cell store one more bit to every cell, bringing the number to two. It's a bit slower than SLC, because two bits are being written to every cell, which in turn makes this type of NAND slower and less reliable. The shortcomings of MLC aren't too bad though and that's why you see a lot of flagship SSDs utilize this type of NAND memory.
- TLC: Now we're starting to get into the budget spectrum with Triple-Layer Cell. As its name might suggest, TLC has three bits written to every cell and all its detriments.
- QLC: You guessed it, QLC is short for Quad-Level Cell and you probably also surmised that it writes four bits to each cell. At this point, speed isn't a concern and storage space becomes the priority here. That said, reliability and endurance become a concern here, but at least SSDs of this type are usually very cheap.
- PLC: Penta-Level Cell SSDs, which write five bits to every cell, are still on the horizon but it'll be interesting to see how low it will make the prices of SSDs go.
That’s everything you need to know about SSDs for now and there has never been a better time to ever buy one. The SSD market is so vibrant right now with manufacturers trying to top each other with increasingly faster and cheaper options
Kevin Lee is IGN's Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam