What SSD do I need? SSDs Explained
If you need a new SSD, whether it’s an upgrade to your current system, for your PS5, or as part of a new build, it can feel a little overwhelming looking at all the countless options. So, in this video, I want to help you understand the different features to look for, what the buzz words mean, and give you my recommendations for drives to fit your needs.
Let’s start with what connectors you’ll see. For consumer drives, the sorts of ones you’ll be looking for, you basically have two form factors, each with a different connector. 2.5” drives are slim slabs like this, and have 2 connections, one for power and the other for data. Those are called SATA, SATA power and data. You need a cable from your computer’s power supply and a separate wire that connects to your motherboard for data, or in most laptops they bundle it together into a nice and easy single connector and wire.
The other option is a tiny little stick drive like this, this is an M.2 drive. This is a 2280 drive, meaning it’s 22mm wide and 80mm long. That’s the standard form factor these days, although other lengths do exist. M.2 drives have two connector versions, an M key where you have a little notch splitting the gold pins into two groups with the smaller group having 5 pins on each side. The other version is called B + M key, where you have two little notches meaning there is 3 groups of pins, with one of the smaller groups having 5 pins and the other having 6.
The B + M key drives are almost always slower than the M key versions, as the B + M key only offers 2 PCIe lanes, whereas the M key offers 4, but that brings us nicely onto the protocol the drives use. You can think of the connector as the type of road, and the protocol is what type of vehicle runs on that road. Again here you have two options.
SATA is the older standard, first announced in 2000, although the first version, SATA 1, was launched in 2003. SATA 3, the most recent and advanced version, launched in 2008 so it’s hardly new. SATA 3 drives have 6Gbps of total bandwidth, meaning the very fastest SATA SSDs peak at around 600MB/s in reads and writes. You can get both 2.5” and, in decreasing volumes, M.2 drives. These are a good option if you have an old 2.5” or even 3.5” hard drive in an older machine that’s painfully slow, swapping that out so your operating system is on an SSD will make the system much, much more usable and responsive.
You could go for a SATA M.2 drive, but I’d only recommend that if the machine you are putting it in requires that standard (which is quite rare to see today). Some older laptops may require them, or older motherboards especially if you are looking to add a second M.2 SSD to one of the few early boards that did have 2 M.2 slots.
Your other protocol option is PCIe, the shared bus that devices like your graphics card make use of. PCIe can be much, much faster. Even the slowest B + M key M.2 SSDs generally run at 1600MB/s, compared to SATA at just 600MB/s, and the very latest drives are hitting an astonishing 7000MB/s. PCIe has two terms that tell you what the theoretical speed should be, how many lanes and what generation they run at.
PCIe Gen 3 is the lowest generation you’ll find for drives being sold today. A single PCIe Gen 3 lane gives you 1GB/s of bandwidth at its maximum, so a B + M key drive has a theoretical maximum of 2GB/s. In the real world it’s a little lower, most drives in that class offer more like 1.6GB/s but it gives you a rough idea. An M key drive with it’s 4 lanes, therefore, offers 4GB/s as it’s max, although again in the real world it’s a little lower, at a peak of around 3.5GB/s for the fastest drives.
PCIe Gen 4 is almost exactly twice as fast, so a single gen 4 lane offers 2GB/s of bandwidth, meaning an M key drive – currently the only kind you can get that supports gen 4 – with it’s 4 lanes can offer a theoretical 8GB/s. Gen 4 drives are still pretty new, and drives and controllers are still being developed so it’s hard to say for sure what the real world max performance will be, although some drives are quoting as high as 7.4GB/s already.
As for the stats that manufacturers like to quote, generally you’ll hear two numbers, a ‘read’ and ‘write’ speed. These figures are their sequential read and write speeds, basically spamming as much data into them as possible in one single transfer. This is the best case scenario, and gives the biggest numbers. Reading is almost always faster than writing, as reading just checks what the value is whereas writing takes slightly longer to actively change the value stored, so you can do less of those changes in the same time. In the real world, you are likely to do a mix of both sequential and random, ie lots of little reads and writes. Random is always going to be slower, so it’s useful to look up reviews for the drives and compare both their headline sequential figures and the less promoted random results.
There are a few more things that might help you fully understand SSDs, like the controller, DRAM and flash types, but I think I’ll split that into it’s own video so do make sure you are subscribed with the bell notification icon enabled so you don’t miss when that comes out!
Right, that’s a lot of info, but how does it relate to your purchase? Well, if you are looking to get a drive for your PS5, here’s what you need to look for. It needs to be a PCIe Gen 4 drive, sized between 250GB and 4TB, and ideally run have a sequential read speed of 5.5GB/s or more. It’ll need to be a standard sized 22mm wide drive, although it does support anywhere from 30mm to 110mm long – but the vast majority of drives you can buy are the standard 2280 size anyway so no big deal.
If you are looking to upgrade a laptop, you’ll want to check what it either already has, or what slots or ports it has available. If it’s got a 2.5” HDD then you can swap that drive out for a 2.5” SSD and reinstall Windows – I’ve done a video on that process already so check that out in the cards above. If you are installing an M.2 drive, one thing that might catch you out is if the laptop doesn’t support double sided drives. Some only have chips and components on one side, some on both. Again, check what the laptop already has or see if you can find a “supported drive list” on the manufacturer’s website.
For a desktop system, you have much more freedom. 2.5” SATA SSDs are generally very easy to install and use, and many systems support M.2 SSDs too. If you want an M.2 drive you will need to work out what the slot you want to install the drive in supports, if it’s a B + M key only, or M key, and if it supports SATA, PCIe Gen 3, or Gen 4. All of that can be found in your motherboard manual which can be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website. For example, on this Aorus X570 Master motherboard, when used with an AMD Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series CPU, all three of these M.2 slots support PCIe Gen 4. There is some nuance to how they are connected to the CPU, but again that’s a topic for another video.
If this is all a bit much, let me run you through some of my picks for drives that might work for you. If you need a 2.5” drive, a Crucial MX500 is an incredibly cheap option with reasonable performance, or a Samsung drive like the 860 or 870 EVO are generally reliable and fast. If you want a B + M key M.2 drive, there aren’t all that many options. Most are SATA, like the WD Blue drive so are a little on the slow side.
If you want a PCIe gen 3 drive, you have a lot more options, the WD SN550 is a great value drive, as are the Crucial P1 and P2 drives. If you want a faster drive, the Sabrent Rocket drive is great, although Samsung tends to sell the most drives so the 970 EVO Plus is available too. As for gen 4, I tend to group these into two categories. The first batch of drives which all peaked at around 5GB/s, and the newer batch that peak around 7GB/s. My favourite that I’ve tested is the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, although I’ve heard good things about the WD SN850 as well. Samsung’s 980 PRO is available too, although it’s not as fast and costs more than either of the others I’ve mentioned.
