SABRENT M.2 NVMe SSD 8TB, Internal Solid State 3300 MB/s Read, PCIe 3.0 2280, M2 Hard Drive High Performance Compatible with PCs, NUCs Laptops, and Desktops (SB-RKTQ-8TB)

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If you value speed in a PS5 SSD above all else, look no further than the Kingston Fury Renegade. It’s one of the fastest drives on the market, with the 1TB version rated at a read speed of 7,300MB/s and write speed of 6,000MB/s, while the 2TB option boosts a 7,000MB/s write speed.

Specs: Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,100MB/s | Sequential write speed: 5,800MB/s | NAND type: 3D TLC | TBW: 700TB Pros: High-end consumer SSD product lines are starting to include more multi-TB capacities, but for now the largest high-end consumer NVMe drives we have on hand are a "mere" 2TB each: Samsung's 970 EVO Plus and the HP EX950. AnandTech 2018 Consumer SSD TestbedThe SSD itself uses QLC NAND. Since more data is stored per cell, the SSD will have a shorter write life than TLC and MLC SSDs. Also, since each cell is more crowded, data leakage will start happening sooner than with TLC and MLC NAND. However, the TBW rating is still high enough that most people will never come close to exceeding the the TBW rating or experience data leakage during the five year warranty period. M.2 drive length isn't always an indicator of drive capacity, but there are limits to NAND-chip density and how many memory modules engineers can stuff onto a PCB of a given size. As a result, most of the M.2 drives we've seen to date have topped out at 2TB, though you can find a few 4TB and 8TB models at lofty prices. The typical capacity waypoints are as follows:

Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,500MB/s | Sequential write speed: 5,650MB/s | NAND type: Micron TLC | TBW: 700TB Pros: However, from an engineering point of view, SSDs didn't needto be that big. The enclosure an SSD comes in has a lot of dead space inside. It's designed in that 2.5-inch size and shape to make the drive fit into those existing bays. So when mobile-device designers, challenged with slimming down laptops and tablets, reassessed this issue, the consensus was clear: The bulky 2.5-inch form factor, eventually, would have to go. The market has settled on 22mm wide as the standard for desktop and laptop implementations; the aftermarket drives available and the accessible slots we've seen have all been that width. The most common lengths we've seen are 80mm ("Type-2280") and 60mm ("Type-2260"). The lengthier the drive, the more NAND chips you can tend to stuff on it (plus, M.2 drives can be single- or double-sided), though know that length isn't an absolute measure of capacity. 42mm, 60mm, and 80mm M.2 SSDs (Credit: Intel) Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 2,000MB/s | Sequential write speed: 2,000MB/s | NAND type: WD TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros: Going with anything less than 4TB with the 870 QVO will turn out to be a bad value as even TLC-based SATA SSDs without a powerful controller and DRAM cache will perform better in durability and transfer speeds. The main reason for QLC is that it makes 8TB a possibility and reduces the price-per-GB significantly to make it a worthwhile consideration.The key thing to remember about M.2 is that it is a form factor, a shape. The bus—the data pathway over which the data travels to and from an M.2 drive—is distinct from M.2 itself and can vary. And it can make all the difference. (Credit: Molly Flores) 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. We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

Even in mSATA's heyday, though, a replacement was in the works. During development, it was known as NGFF, for "Next-Generation Form Factor." As it took shape, though, it took on its current, final name: M.2. The drives would be smaller, potentially more capacious, and, most important, not necessarily reliant on SATA. The VectoTech Rapid is another external 8TB SSD that utilizes a SATA SSD in a custom enclosure that takes up very little space and is light enough to be carried around without hassle. It also uses a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface for data transfer, which we believe a majority of the devices manufactured support today.

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The largest consumer SSDs we have to compare against are Samsung's earlier 4TB SATA SSDs. We've included the 4TB 860 EVO. For some tests, we also have included results from a few enterprise drives: 8TB NVMe models from Intel and SK hynix, and 4TB SATA drives from Kingston and Samsung. These all use TLC NAND, but without SLC caching. Kioxia originally demonstrated the technical specifications for BiCS5 at ISSCC 2019. The original design was a 128-layer quad-plane design with a CMOS-under-Array (CuA) configuration. However, the BiCS we tested here is a 112-layer dual-plane design without CuA. These compromises suggest a bigger focus on production efficiency (density and yield), which explains the 1Tb dies used here. These characteristics have potentially impacted other drives by WD that have had their flash upgraded or replaced.

The 870 QVO’s write speed comes in at 530MB/s, while the read speed is set at a slightly higher 560MB/s. The write endurance of the SSD is rated at 2,880 TB, much higher than the QLC NVMe SSDs we saw earlier. The high capacity of the 870 QVO and its 2.5-inch form factor makes it the ideal choice for replacing your existing high-capacity hard drives, as the performance gains will be pretty significant than even the fastest ones. The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40 is an unapologetically bright RGB-lit PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD that blings up your PC. Its 4K read and write speeds should keep most gamers happy, too. The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G carries some respectable wins out of its duel with other competing drives we've tested, and it looked great doing it. The first attempt was a new form factor called mini-SATA, or mSATA. The boiled-down essence of an SSD with the shell removed, an mSATA drive is a bare, rectangular circuit board. (Most mSATA drives relevant to upgraders measure about 1 by 2 inches.) mSATA drives fit into a special slot in a laptop's logic board or on a PC motherboard. As the name suggests, the slot is a conduit to the Serial ATA bus in the system. The interface on the drive end is an edge connector on the PCB, as opposed to the usual SATA cabling. The mSATA drive also draws all the power it needs through the slot. (Credit: HP) I have added a picture of the benchmark comparison between the Samsung and the Sabrent drives on this review. I am super pleased, it works really well and it is basically comparable in speed.

Installing the drive is quite simple, but remember that the slot on the motherboard could be under the graphic card or hidden a bit by the CPU cooler depending on your mother board design. If you have no idea of what you are doing, get help from a friend that does or visit a store to get it installed. Building a PC is quite easy, but if you don't know how that works and you don't want or have time to go through the learning curve, it is better not to risk it. Early examples of the latest generation of M.2 drives, using the PCI Express 5.0 bus, also come in the Type-2280 format, but it's expected that some PCIe 5.0 slots on new motherboards will be built to support the larger Type-25110 format (25mm by 110mm), so we may well see PCIe 5.0 SSDs with these dimensions as well. PCIe 5 drives are capable of tremendous throughput speeds (in excess of 10,000MBps) that should generate abundant heat, and the SSDs we have seen so far come with substantial built-in heatsinks. The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow in the Editors' Choice-winning SSD 980 Pro, but for the most part it makes a great product even better. This power-efficient 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. It doesn't quite merit the 980 Pro's Editors' Choice award, because other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For