Solid State Drives

These devices will breath new performance into an otherwise sluggish but well equipped upgrade path for your existing system. They are also great for building a budget computer from scratch with.

I always prefer Samsung devices when it comes to NVMe OR SSDs. They perform at or above their rated specifications with the Samsung drivers. Their support staff are professional and courteous. It is easy doing business with Samsung. I highly recommend their products for all but the MOST budget conscious systems. SSDs run at SATA 6 maximums, so 150MB/s theoretical values with some actually performing at 120+MB/s. Most will not be able to see or feel a difference in gaming performance between any SSD and any NVMe device. When you transcode video or work with other massive files regularly, take the NVMe path instead of an SSD.

For gaming and day to day use, these get the job done, at about twice the speed of any mechanical drive. If you only have mechanical drives you will notice the speed difference for nearly every task you perform. If you have been following my blog, I started using an Intel X25-M 80G SSD in 2007. After 13 years, that Intel SSD died, not from wear leveling on the storage chips, but the controller unit failed. I got my money’s worth and then some.

If you are on a tighter budget the following units are a bit more friendly on the pocket book, not as large in storage capacity, but the main thing is to install Windows on anything BUT a mechanical drive. I use two of these to move large amounts of data between my systems.