WATCH THAT BOOT.If your desktop is getting a PCI Express/NVMe drive for the first time, verify with the motherboard or PC maker that the drive will be bootable. It's unlikely, but a BIOS upgrade may be required to get you there. (This is an issue with older motherboards, not current ones.)

The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives for 2023 - PCMag UK

The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. The heatsink-equipped version of this drive performed slightly better than the non-heatsink version (which we tested using our testbed's motherboard's heatsink) in most of our benchmarks. A few other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability and deep feature set make this Samsung SSD a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For Until the last few years, the typical SSD was a little slab, designed to fit into the same space or drive bay inside a PC as a spinning hard drive. You can still find SSDs in this form factor, known as 2.5-inch drives, but times have changed. South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix is a relative newcomer to the consumer solid-state drive market, but you would never know that based on its first offerings. The SK Hynix Platinum P41, a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, is its best yet. It dominated our PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage benchmark testing, setting several new records in the process. The P41 supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. SK Hynix provides a clone utility tool, the SK Hynix System Migration Utility, for its SSDs, in addition to Easy Drive Manager software, which lets you see detailed information on drive health, run diagnostics, and erase the drive. And the P41 can be had for a very reasonable price in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. Who It's For As we discuss in our parallel roundup, The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives, M.2 drives are differentiated by a four- or five-digit number listed in their names or specifications. The number is a measurement in millimeters, with the first two digits being the drive's width and the remaining two or three digits telling you how long it is.We've already mentioned one you know—SSD. It stands for "solid-state drive," a storage drive made up of flash memory in modules called NANDs and governed by a controller chip. (The name NAND comes from a type of logic gate in Boolean algebra; we'll try to explain terms as we go along, but if you need a refresher in SSD lingo see our rundown of 20 terms you need to know.) Unfortunately, SSD shopping has been complicated in recent years by the emergence of three new technologies: M.2, PCI Express (abbreviated PCIe), and NVMe. All three are centered around making SSDs smaller or faster. They also make buying a solid-state drive more challenging than ever.

WD_BLACK SN750 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Gaming SSD up to

If you're a custom PC builder with RGB-lighting fever, and have RGB-ified just about every inch and corner of your system, perk up: ADATA has brought pretty lights to the internal SSD final frontier. The XPG Spectrix S40G is the most flamboyant NVMe drive we've seen to date. With the S40G's fine 4K write speeds, top-notch sequential-read speeds, and respectable durability rating, ADATA makes having a top-of-the line, over-the-top SSD affordable and fun, in one fell swoop. Who It's For Many of today's premium laptops can make use of PCI Express M.2 drives. (Important: Some, like the latest Apple MacBooks, have PCI Express drives soldered, in not-upgradable fashion, to the laptop's mainboard, so "PCI Express SSD" doesn't necessarily imply "removable M.2 SSD module.") As mentioned, almost all new desktop motherboards have M.2 slots, most of which support PCI Express drives.

You can use these PCIe 4.0-based SSDs in PCIe 3.0-only systems, but they'll just dial down to PCIe 3.0 speeds. So should you opt for one? If you'll be assembling or upgrading a late-model AMD or Intel PC with the right chipset, by all means. Hardcore gamers and content creators working on today's newer PCs will stand to gain the most. If you have a PCIe 4.0-capable slot for one, get one; otherwise, 3.0 will likely do you fine.

M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs - M.2 PCIe 4.0 Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSD Solid M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs - M.2 PCIe 4.0 Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSD Solid

Also, as we mentioned, realize that a few laptops solder their SSDs directly to the mainboard to save space, so a drive upgrade may not be possible. Note, too, that upgrading a laptop to a new SSD may violate the terms of any existing warranty. Why did SSDs take so long to get so small? Actually, from a strict manufacturing viewpoint, they never neededto be that big in the first place. Classic 2.5-inch SSDs have a lot of dead space inside, as memory chips are much smaller than rotating drive mechanisms, but they were designed to fit into existing bays to replace hard drives. In the move from bulky desktops to ultra-slim laptops and tablets, one thing came clear: That fatter kind of drive would have to go. An M.2 drive reduces an SSD to its essentials: just a strip of a circuit board studded with silicon, much leaner and easier to fit into tight spaces.Thedata bus, or pathway, over which your data travels to and from an M.2 drive is a whole other matter, which is where PCI Express and NVMe come in. We'll get to the significance of NVMe in a moment; first, let's discuss the key physical traits of an M.2 drive that you need to understand. (The video below is a good primer.) In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Now let's reiterate an important point: You may know an M.2 solid-state drive's length and capacity, but that doesn't tell you about thebusor interface it makes use of. That detail is vital to know—just as important as making sure the drive physically fits in the space you have.