
The biggest thing to watch out for is the technology used to connect the SSD to your PC. But unlike the olden days of SSDs, modern drives won’t wear out with normal consumer usage, as Tech Report tested and proved years ago with a grueling endurance test. Most SSD manufacturers offer a three-year warranty, and some nicer models are guaranteed for five years. What to look for in an SSDĬapacity and price are important, of course, and a long warranty can alleviate fears of premature data death.

If your hardware can’t boot from an NVMe SSD, your machine should still be able to use it as a secondary drive.
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You may need to install a BIOS update for your board. Do a Google search for your motherboard and see if it supports booting from NVMe. PCs purchased during the past year or two should have no problem booting from an NVMe drive, but support for that can be iffy in older motherboards. To get the most out of an NVMe drive, you want to run your operating system on it, so you must have a system that recognizes the drive and can boot from it.
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The Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSD in an M.2 slot.

Regardless, the Sabrent Rocket expertly fits a niche that is only growing more common with devices such as the Steam Deck. The Rocket Q4 is a great SSD, but if your device is able to handle the longer 2280 drives, you’ll likely have more options to choose from and might be able to find better price-for-performance at that standard size. In our testing it aced the 48GB and 450GB transfer tests-even beating out other top-notch full-sized PCIe 4.0 drives. This HMB (Host Memory Buffer) drive has great everyday performance and a decent capacity-to-cost. It’s only 30mm long, which means you can use it in small devices such as the red-hot Steam Deck. Its latest Rocket Q4 is our favorite, with up to 2TB of capacity and shockingly good real-world performance. Thankfully, Sabrent has changed that with its line of Rocket half-sized 2230 small for- factor SSDs.
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In the past, you were out of luck if you wanted to upgrade your storage in a smaller-sized device such as a handheld gaming console where the longer 2280 NVMe SSDs wouldn’t fit. Still, the T700 is undoubtedly the king of the hill by a fair margin among any SSD currently, and if your system is equipped to handle it, you’re not likely to find a faster drive for quite some time. This kind of speed will cost you though, as the T700 is nearly twice as expensive as some very good PCIe 4.0 drives on this list. The drive itself is available in 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB capacities of storage. Just to give an idea of how fast we’re talking here, in a side-by-side comparison with the WD Black SN850X, our pick for best PCIe 4.0 SSD, the T700 almost doubled it in sequential read and write benchmarks and was over a minute faster in the 48GB transfer test and about 40 seconds faster in the 450GB transfer tests. In our testing, the Crucial T700 absolutely obliterated the competition in both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. It is, without a doubt, the fastest NVMe SSD for sustained throughput that we at PCWorld have ever tested. If you do decide to upgrade, there is currently no better PCIe 5.0 SSD than the Crucial T700. PCIe 5.0 is finally here and for those who crave the latest and greatest, the upgrade will help satisfy your desire to be on the bleeding edge. Picking the perfect SSD isn’t as simple as it used to be, though excellent new drives like the SK Hynix Platinum P41 are certainly trying to achieve no-brainer upgrade status. But tiny NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) “gumstick” SSDs that fit in an M.2 connection on a modern motherboard are becoming increasingly common, along with blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 solid-state drives for compatible PCs, and you’ll even find SSDs that sit on a PCIe adapter and slot into your motherboard like a graphics card or sound card.

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Many SSDs come in a 2.5-inch form factor and connect to your PC via the same SATA port used by a traditional hard drive. You can spend big to achieve read and write speeds that reach a whole other level, or you can find top-notch SSDs that offer solid performance without breaking the bank. But not all solid-state drives are the same. These wondrous devices speed up boot times, improve the responsiveness of your programs and games, and generally make your computer feel fast. Switching to a solid-state drive is the best upgrade you can make for your PC.
