What jobs we grade
- System drive. Everyday responsiveness: random and sequential read speed, and a DRAM cache or a good host-memory design.
- Games and files. Useful capacity for the money. Speed matters less once it is fast enough.
- Heavy creative work. Sustained writes and endurance (TBW) for video scratch disks and large exports.
The filters that matter
- Capacity. Compare drives of the same size. Price per terabyte drops with size.
- Interface. PCIe 5.0, 4.0 or 3.0 NVMe, or SATA. Your motherboard decides which you can use at full speed.
- Form factor. M.2 2280 is the common size. 2230 and 2242 are for handhelds and small systems. 2.5" is for SATA bays.
- Endurance (TBW) and warranty. How much writing the drive is rated for.
- Heatsink. Useful in hot slots, a problem in tight ones.
For a system drive, a fast PCIe 4.0 drive is usually enough. PCIe 5.0 mostly pays off in heavy creative work.
Compatibility to check
The slot’s size and interface. A PCIe 5.0 drive in a PCIe 4.0 slot works at the slot’s speed, so you would pay for speed you do not get. A heatsink must clear whatever sits above the slot. See Check compatibility.
What you will see in Explorer
One row per drive with price, grade for the role you chose, Value, capacity, interface and endurance. Specs shows the rest.
Things to check outside The Comparator
- Real-world speed in your own machine
- Reliability beyond the published TBW and warranty
- Whether your laptop or handheld takes the size you chose
For buying advice, see the Price2Click SSD guide.