Q&A
Do I need a really fast SSD?
As a gamer you won’t see much benefit –
levels will only load fractions of seconds
faster. They’re more useful if you work with
very large files, such as when video editing.Should I worry about drive life?
Early SSDs suffered from performance
degradation and they weren’t rated to last all
that long. These days most SSDs will last the
better part of ten years with average usage.Dictionary
NVMe/AHCI – The protocol a drive uses to
talk to the PC. AHCI is an old standard
designed for hard drives and used with SATA
drives. NVMe is designed specifically for
SSDs and can be much faster.M. 2/SATA /PCIe – The physical connection
between drive and PC. SATA is the classic
hard drive connection, PCIe the same slot
that your graphics card plugs into, M.2 is a
new storage-specific slot for tiny SSDs.SLC/MLC/TLC – Single- multi- or triple-
level cell. SSD memory cells can store one bit
of information or several. The fewer, the
faster information can be written to them and
the greater the longevity of the drive.Sequential/random – Sequential tests
measure how fast a drive can continually
read/write a big block of data, in MB/s.
Random tests are where the drive has to
constantly look all over the place for separate
bits of data and so is measured in Input/
Output Operations per second (IOPs).T
he speed advantage of
SSDs has been known
for a long time, but low
capacities and high
prices have previously
meant we had to make compromises.
Usually, pairing it with a bigger
conventional drive and having not
quite the best of both worlds. But
now capacities have risen and prices
dropped, so much so that there’s little
reason to buy another conventional
hard drive at all.
Stick to the traditional 2.5-inch
SATA SSD route, and while you won’t
find a much faster device than those
of a few years ago, you will get far
greater capacity: 500GB is now
available for under £100. Meanwhile,
new connection standards haveIn Association With
opened up the maximum speed of the
most expensive drives to astonishing
levels. The latest M.2 NVMe drives
are seven times faster than the fastest
SATAs. With that in mind, on these
pages we round up some of the best
Solid State Drives out there at the
moment to consider which one gives
you the best storage and performance
for your money.