SABRENT M.2 NVMe SSD 8TB, Internal Solid State 3300 MB/s Read, PCIe 3.0 2280, M2 Hard Drive High Performance Compatible with PCs, NUCs Laptops, and Desktops (SB-RKTQ-8TB)

Product Information

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. We've introduced you to M.2 drives and 2.5-inch drives above, but let's get into them in a bit more detail. 2.5-Inch SSDs: The Basic Drive U.2 is rare in consumer PCs; it's mostly made with enterprise customers in mind. A U.2 drive like the now-vintage Intel SSD 750 Series connects to a U.2 port on the motherboard via a special cable, or to a PCI Express M.2 slot using a special adapter. These drives almost always come in the 2.5-inch form factor. Unless you have a U.2 port on your desktop motherboard you want to use, you can ignore them. (And even if you do, you can still probably hook up an M.2 drive.) Random Write (4KB, QD32) Up to 88,000 IOPS Random Write * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated M.2 slots are now common in new desktop motherboards and practically universal in late-model laptops. M.2 solid-state drives are the 2.5-inch drive distilled to its essence, extremely minimal in their design and implementation. But they're also the most complicated to understand before you buy. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Software is another shopping consideration that only the storage nerds out there might dig into, but regardless of which company you go with, any SSD software management dashboard should have at least a secure erase option, a firmware update module, and some kind of migration tool that will let you safely and securely move data from one drive to another. Most mainstream drives will have you covered there. 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.)

So, Which Internal SSD Should I Buy?

The Intel 670p is an older driver, but it is also a proven budget option that is often on steep sale. It’s best to grab it at 1TB or 2TB, as the 512GB model is slower with a smaller pSLC cache. The drive has DRAM, which is nice, and it has the fastest QLC on the market, even now. Performance outside of the cache does not suffer as much as a consequence.

The Solidigm P41 Plus is the best budget DRAM-less M.2 NVMe SSD on the market. It’s particularly good at 2TB, rivaling the 670p, which is older but comparable. This is no surprise as Intel’s NAND and SSD division migrated to Solidigm after a sale of the company to SK hynix, so the P41 Plus is reminiscent of that excellent budget drive. We would give the edge to the P41 Plus if you can make full use of the drive, which includes total Synergy 2.0 SSD driversupport. We’d also give the P41 Plus the edge over the P3 and P3 Plus if you’re shopping for your primary drive, as it has more consistent performance, even if maximum bandwidth is lower.has become a more attractive capacity point for SSDs as time has gone on. While there are now many options available, most come with compromises of one sort or another. You may have to settle for QLC, a weaker controller, no DRAM, unreliable hardware, etc. This is not always a big deal, especially if the drive is intended to be a secondary gaming drive. In the PlayStation 5, however, extra cooling is beneficial, so it’s convenient to have a heatsink option available. At the same time, laptops favor bare drives and especially single-sided drives, the latter of which have been very rare with TLC until recently. 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.