The drive you use in your computer matters, and these days there are plenty of options to choose from. Especially for people who want to add more power to their gaming PCs or laptops at a lower cost, finding the best type of drive for a computer means considering the pros and cons of solid-state drives (SSDs). But with a number of different types to choose from, finding the SSD you need can be confusing at first. Because we enjoy exploring the differences and performance of many different types of drives, we developed this What's the Diff post to explain it all to you.
SSDs have become a popular choice due to their smaller size and offer the capability of faster data read and write speeds. In this post we cover:
What is an SSD?
What is a SATA SSD?
What is an M.2 SSD?
What is an NVMe SSD?
Which SSD is right for you?
A brief introduction to SSDs
SSDs are common drives that are standard in most computers today, as is the case with Apple's Mac line. Instead of using hard drives, motors, and read/write heads like hard disk drives (HDDs), SSDs use persistent flash memory to store information. The main reason why SSDs are so widespread is that they have the advantage over HDDs that they run faster and consume less power. You can read more about the difference between SSD and HDD in this post.
SSDs, namely NVMe drives and M.2 drives, also come in a variety of form factors, allowing them to be applied to a variety of devices.
Take a look at SATA SSDs
A Serial AT (SATA) accessory is now widely accepted as the standard for PC storage. A SATA SSD is an SSD equipped with a SATA interface. SATA SSDs have the advantage of being faster than spinning hard drives, but their speed limit is 600MB/s. In general, SATA SSDs offer cheaper storage than M.2 or NVMe drives, so they tend to be a better option for those looking for a general-purpose drive on a tighter budget.
One of the downsides to SATA drives is that they require two cables to function properly, so they can clutter up your setup and even affect airflow in a computer. However, not all SSD form factors use the same type of connection, so they vary in speed and clutter in their setup.
What are M.2 drives?
M.2 is a new form factor for SSDs that can be plugged directly into a computer's motherboard without additional cables. M.2 SSDs are significantly smaller than traditional 2.5-inch SSDs, which is why they have become popular in gaming setups because they take up less space.
Even at this smaller size, M.2 SSDs can store as much data as other SSDs, with storage sizes up to 8TB. But while they can store the same amount of data and are generally faster than other SSDs, they're also more expensive. As the old saying goes, you can only have two of the following: cheap, fast, or good.
People looking to upgrade their gaming setup with an M.2 SSD will need to make sure their motherboard has one or two M.2 slots. If your computer has two or more slots, you can operate the drives in RAID.
An M.2 SSD can be SATA-based, PCIe-based with NVMe support, or PCIe-based without NVMe support. This versatility means that an M.2 SSD with NVMe support offers up to five times the bandwidth of a SATA M.2 model and offers faster performance for file transfers, video or photo editing, transcoding, compression and decompression.
NVMe-SSD
Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives were introduced in 2013 to connect to the PCI Express (PCIe) slot on a motherboard instead of using SATA bandwidth. NVMe drives can typically deliver sustained read/write speeds of 3.5GB/s, in contrast to SATA SSDs which are capped at 600MB/s. Because NVMe SSDs can achieve higher speeds than SATA SSDs like M.2 drives, they're ideal for gaming or high-resolution video editing.
However, their high speeds come at a high price: NVMe drives are some of the most expensive drives on the market.