![]() ![]() While the drive electronics are much smaller than 2.5 inches, its enclosure will measure a bit wider (actually 2.75 inches wide, despite the name), so it will fit into the same mounting brackets in your desktop or laptop used by 2.5-inch hard drives. The 2.5-inch Serial ATA SSD iwas one of the earliest consumer-facing implementations of SSD technology and remains popular, especially for upgrading older PCs. We've introduced you to M.2 drives and 2.5-inch drives above, but let's get into them in a bit more detail. In these scenarios, choosing a SATA-based option that still keeps up in 4K random read and writes is the value move, and will give you more budget to play with when upgrading the rest of your system.Īnd if you're simply replacing a hard drive as your boot drive, you'll love the speed boost whichever kind you go with. At capacities of 4TB or above, 2.5-inch SATA drives are often much cheaper than their M.2 counterparts. ![]() If you're installing an SSD as a secondary drive, and your PC's case has the spare room, you can probably choose between 2.5-inch or M.2, especially if it's a drive you will use for gaming or just backing up. A 2.5-inch SATA drive might make sense only if you're upgrading or building from older hardware, because almost all new motherboards now have at least one M.2 slot of some kind, and these drives save lots of space in compact PC builds. If you're building a new PC from scratch, you definitely want an internal M.2 or 2.5-inch SATA SSD as your boot drive nowadays. ( See our favorite SSDs for laptop upgrades.) Some laptops, note, have the storage chips soldered down to the mainboard and aren't upgradable at all.įor a desktop, the right SSD to buy depends much more on what you are doing with your computer, and what your aim is. (That is, if you can open it at all.) With laptop upgrades, you typically have much less flexibility than upgrading a desktop your only option might be buying a drive in a higher capacity than the existing one, since you'll likely have only one M.2 slot or 2.5-inch bay to work with. If you can't get the info off the web beforehand, or from the manufacturer, you'll need (in most cases) to open up your laptop to see whether you have upgradable storage in the first place. When buying an internal SSD to upgrade or augment a system you own, you need to start by figuring out what your system can actually accept: a 2.5-inch SATA drive only? Does it have an M.2 slot? What length of M.2 drive can it take, and using which bus type? If you're upgrading a laptop, in most cases you'll have the option only to swap out the internal drive, not to add another. (If you'd like a deep overview of all the SSD terms shoppers should know, check out our SSD dejargonizer for a full breakdown.) M.2 SSDs transfer data between the drive and computer via one of two bus types: the same Serial ATA bus used by 2.5-inch drives, or the PCI Express bus, the lanes and pathways of which can also be used by other hardware, such as graphics cards. Within those three physical forms are some crucial variations, though. You'll see them in three main physical forms: (1) 2.5-inch drives, (2) M.2 drives, and (3) add-in-board (AIB) SSDs. On average (because of the limitations of current bus technology), the higher end of the sequential speed spectrum you should expect to see over the fastest current interfaces (Thunderbolt 4 or USB 3.2 Gen 2x2) is in the range of 2,500 megabytes per second (MBps) for reads and 2,000MBps for writes. Most are built for portability, with some small enough to fit on a keychain. But it's good to know some nuances regarding how fast each kind can be.Įxternal SSDs are drives with their own standalone enclosures, which plug into your laptop or desktop via a USB cable or (less commonly) a Thunderbolt cable. "Internal" means the drive goes inside a desktop PC's or laptop's chassis, while "external" means it connects to a computer via a cable. Most of what you need to know is obvious from the name. Let's dig in.įirst, some context on the difference between internal and external SSDs. First, see our top tested picks, broken out below in the buying guide that follows them, you'll learn how to sort through the different (and often confusing) terminologies associated with SSDs, as well as find out what you need to know when it comes to SSD pricing, speeds, durability, warranty durations, and more. This guide discusses the pros and cons of our top-rated internal SSDs. SSD interfaces have evolved greatly over the last few years, and SSDs themselves are taking on different shapes and core technologies. That said, while almost any SSD is much faster than any hard drive, not all SSDs are created equal-not by a long shot. ![]()
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