But first, the shape issue. Any M.2 drive you are looking at will be labeled with a four- or five-digit number as part of its specifications or model name. It's a measurement, in millimeters: The first two numbers define the drive's width, the second two the length. At the core, an SSD is just a thin circuit board studded with flash-memory and controller chips. Why not design around that? Thus the M.2 form factor was born. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. 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. SATA is slowest: SATA isn't as fast as an M.2 PCIe or a PCIe add-in card, but the majority of desktops and many laptops support 2.5-inch SATA drives, and many doing typical mainstream tasks users won't notice the difference between a good recent SATA drive and a faster PCIe model. Blistering Speed: The Gen4 PCIe interface and M.2 2280 form factor of this SSD offer speeds of up to 7,300 MB/s. This means lightning-fast loading times for games and near-instantaneous data access.

A range of capacities from 1TB to 4TB(2) means you get to keep more of today’s games that can take up 200GB(2) or more of storage. There were some issues getting my PC to notice this SSD. I eventually fixed it using device manager, but it's definitely not plug & play friendly. This is in sharp contrast to another Samsung SSD I bought. Samsung's "Magician" software did all the necessary pathfinding & formatting for me, whereas WD's software didn't demonstrate that much value. 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. M.2 Form Factor: The M.2 form factor allows for a clean and compact installation on compatible motherboards, saving space in your PC case.While PCIe 4.0 SSDs have a theoretical maximum speed of 8,000MB/s, the PNY XLR8 CS3140 pushes right up to that line with a rated sequential read speed of 7,500MB/s, along with a 6,850MB/s sequential write rating for its 2TB and 4TB capacities (5,650MB/s for 1TB). Corsair offers various cooling options for this drive, with the MP600 Pro LPX tailored with a low-profile heatsink fit for the PS5.

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. (Credit: Molly Flores)

One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's "Optane SSDs" were SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Intel sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which spun it off into a new subsidiary, Solidigm.)

The Crucial T500 is for users willing to pay a little extra to get the best PCI Express 4.0 SSD performance. At a time when many low-priced DRAM-less SSDs are hitting the market, the T500 has a full DRAM cache (as well as a top-shelf Phison controller and 232-layer TLC NAND flash), which could give it an advantage in sustained large-file transfers, as well as in use with the PS5. The SK Hynix Platinum P41 is a worthy choice for anyone looking to buy a high-performance PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSD without breaking the bank. It blew away several of our benchmark records. The P41 provides AES hardware-based encryption and a clone utility tool as well as SSD management software. Just be forewarned that with its blistering speed, you will want to add a heatsink, the one item of note that it is missing. Based on “out-of-box performance” using a PCIe 4.0 motherboard. Speed may vary due to host hardware, software and usage.Our tests reflect this for the most part, recording a sequential read speed of 7,256MB/s in CrystalDiskMark 8, with a somewhat lower than expected sequential write speed of 6,082MB/s in the same test. Interestingly though, it had the highest random write performance of any drive we tested (4,938MB/s), including the vaunted Samsung Pro 990, which had a roughly 17% slower random write rate (4,105MB/s). It also had the best average data copy rate of all the drives we tested recently with 1,733MB/s, so this is not only a great gaming SSD, it’s a fantastic all around performer at a great price.