7 best ssd picks from someone who clones drives weekly

The last spinning drive in this house sits in a machine my wife will not let me replace, and it needs about four minutes to reach a usable desktop. Swapping one of those for solid state is still the biggest jump you can buy for the money, bigger than a new processor, bigger than more memory, and i have done it on thirty odd machines by now. The best ssd for any given computer is decided by the slot it has, not by the numbers printed on the box, and that is where most people go wrong. sata or m.2, gen4 or gen5, and whether the laptop has a spare slot at all. nothing here is an external drive, that is its own thread.

1. Best overall, the Samsung 870 EVO in the 1TB size. Old fashioned 2.5 inch sata, which is the point, because it drops into any laptop or desktop of the last fifteen years without you checking anything first. Forty five thousand ratings at 4.8 makes it the most trusted drive on this list by a mile. Sata caps it at 560 megabytes a second, a fraction of what the m.2 drives below manage, and per terabyte it is no longer the clever buy it once was.

2. Best m.2 ssd for a normal build, the Kingston NV3. Gen4 in a single sided stick that weighs about as much as a stamp, reading around 6000 megabytes a second, for roughly a hundred and fifty. Four thousand a month, and it has climbed to second in the whole category. That 6000 figure is the giveaway, it sits well under what a gen4 slot can actually carry, so this is the value tier rather than the quick tier. For a boot drive nobody will ever notice.

3. Best gaming ssd, the Samsung 990 PRO in 2TB. 7450 megabytes a second on gen4, and the drive that has been sat in half the enthusiast builds i have opened for two years running. High three hundreds. Six thousand a month still go out. It is no longer Samsung's flagship, which is exactly why it is worth looking at, though the price has not fallen the way you would expect once a newer one arrives above it.

4. Best ps5 ssd, the WD_BLACK SN850P with the heatsink. Officially licensed for the console, 7300 megabytes a second, and the heatsink is the right shape for the bay already, so no fiddling with a thermal pad. 4.8 across eleven thousand ratings. You pay for the badge and the metal, and the drive inside is not far off cheaper models, but it goes in and works, which on a console is the job.

5. Best for a laptop upgrade, the Crucial P310. 7100 read, 6000 write, a stick Crucial aim squarely at laptops and handhelds, with recovery software bundled in. Just under two hundred. The reviews are a long line of people who put it in an older laptop and got a machine that felt new. A terabyte vanishes under five modern games though, so buy the bigger one if the laptop has only one slot.

6. Best for a handheld, the WD_Black SN7100. 7250 read and 6900 write puts it ahead of most gen4 drives, and it is the highest rated thing here at 4.8, built to run in laptops and small consoles without much airflow. There is no heatsink on it at all, so if it is going into a console bay rather than a laptop you are buying one separately, which annoyed me more than it should have.

7. Best if your board does pcie 5.0, the Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB. 14,700 megabytes a second is roughly double the 990 PRO, and it is aimed at video work more than games, where the difference is honestly small. Four hundred. It needs a gen5 slot to do any of that, so check the manual before ordering, and at eighteen hundred ratings it has far less history behind it than everything else on the list.

the same four things come up under any storage post.

is gen5 worth paying for? not for games. for moving huge files around all day, yes, and the 9100 PRO is the one to get.

which is the best nvme ssd for an older board? the Kingston. it drops back to whatever the slot supports and costs the least of the m.2 drives here.

do these need heatsinks? in a laptop, no. in a ps5 or a tight case, yes, and only the SN850P arrives with one.

one terabyte or two? two, every time, unless the budget genuinely stops you. i have never once heard someone complain they bought too much storage.