I’ve been testing, reviewing, and otherwise writing about PCs and other gadgets for AnandTech, Ars Technica, and Wirecutter since 2012. I’ve been building, upgrading, and fixing PCs for two decades, and I spent five of those years in IT departments buying and repairing business laptops and desktops as well as helping people buy the best tech for their needs.

Since 2013, when Wirecutter began recommending SSDs, we’ve been in contact with storage experts, learning all there is to know about SSD technology and gathering insights from the professionals who benchmark these drives for a living. There’s nothing we could learn by running our own benchmarks that we can’t get from the experts’ numbers, so our testing is mostly limited to putting these SSDs in our own computers and using them in day-to-day work. We consider experts’ benchmarks in the context of our knowledge of what most people actually need in an SSD, and we recommend the best drives for each type of person.

Buying and installing a good SSD is the single most important thing you can do to make a desktop or laptop PC feel speedy and responsive. Whether you’re building a new computer, upgrading an old SSD to get more space, or replacing a traditional hard drive, today’s SSDs are faster and cheaper than they’ve ever been, and you can find plenty of great options to choose from.

If you have a PC that’s one to five years old and still relies on a traditional hard drive, replacing that drive with an SSD will speed up everything from booting your PC to loading games to opening and switching between apps. Traditional hard drives have small moving parts that need to shift around to read and write data from and to different places on the drive, which takes time. Because SSDs have no moving parts, they dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend sitting around and waiting for things to happen. If you’ve bought a used computer that contains a hard drive, installing an SSD is an affordable way to make it run like new.

If you’re upgrading a desktop or laptop that already uses an SSD, you likely won’t notice a big difference in speed after you replace the older drive, so you generally shouldn’t upgrade unless you’re running out of space. But it’s cheaper than ever to buy a big, 500 GB or 1 TB SSD with more room for games, movies, photos, and anything else you need to store. The amount of storage you can buy for $100 has shifted dramatically in the past few years—a 1 TB SSD purchased today, for example, costs about the same as a 240 GB SSD that I bought in 2015.

Upgrading to an SSD can make a huge difference if you’re coming from a mechanical hard drive, and to maximize that advantage you should also upgrade your RAM if your computer has 4 GB or less. For most people, 8 GB of RAM is plenty and should provide a noticeable speed boost in day-to-day use; Crucial has a handy page that can help you find what sort of memory your computer needs. And if you’re playing high-end games or using powerful apps such as Photoshop or Premiere to edit photos or video files, it’s not a bad idea to upgrade to 16 GB if you can afford it.

Mac owners should think twice about an SSD upgrade. Though you can upgrade some older (mostly pre-2013) MacBooks with standard SATA drives, you can’t do the same with the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Apple laptops from 2013, 2014, or 2015 often support such upgrades, but only with specialized, expensive drives from just a couple of manufacturers. As such, we’ve aimed this guide mostly at non-Mac owners.

This guide also isn’t for people looking for the speediest cutting-edge storage you can get. For people who need the fastest possible performance or drives with the best possible endurance ratings, pricey SSDs like those in Samsung’s Pro series and drives that support the PCI Express 4.0 specification do offer some benefits over the picks in this guide. But most people don’t need and wouldn’t notice these benefits and are better off saving that money (or putting it toward a higher-capacity SSD).

Before you buy, it’s important to figure out what kind of SSD fits your computer. Crucial has a comprehensive upgrade advisor page that can help you locate your computer or motherboard model and can tell you what sort of drive you need. The four most common options are M.2 NVMe drives, 2.5-inch SATA drives, M.2 SATA drives, and mSATA drives.

• M.2 NVMe SSDs (referred to throughout this guide as “NVMe SSDs”) are gumstick-shaped drives that fit in newer laptop or desktop computers and on most motherboards you can buy to build your own desktop PC. M.2 refers to the type of connector they use, and NVMe is the interface protocol they use. Because NVMe drives (as explained in this video) use the PCI Express (PCIe) interface to communicate with the rest of your computer, a typical NVMe SSD can be as much as six or seven times faster than SATA drives (depending on the drive you get, and what you’re doing).
• 2.5-inch SATA SSDs are made to fit into older or cheaper laptops that use a 2.5-inch spinning hard drive, or older desktops that lack a slot for M.2 drives. SATA (which refers to both the connector type and the interface protocol, in this case) is older and slower than NVMe, but SATA SSDs are still noticeably faster than SATA hard drives, and they’re a worthwhile upgrade for most computers built after 2011 or 2012.
• M.2 SATA SSDs use the same connector as M.2 NVMe SSDs, and some computers that can use NVMe drives can also use M.2 SATA drives. M.2 SATA SSDs used to be good budget options for any computer with an M.2 slot, but modern NVMe drives cost roughly the same and perform much better—use an M.2 SATA SSD only if you have to.
• mSATA SSDs look a bit like shorter, wider M.2 drives. If you have a laptop made between approximately 2012 and 2014 and it doesn’t contain a 2.5-inch hard drive, you may need an mSATA drive. (These drives are relatively rare, and none of our picks come in an mSATA variety, but right now we’d recommend the Kingston KC600 to people who need one.)

SSDs are still more expensive than mechanical drives for the same amount of storage, and the biggest hard drives can still hold more data than the most capacious SSDs. But that price gap has narrowed in the past few years: As of early 2021, you can buy a 1 TB SSD for roughly $100, an amount that would have bought you a 250 GB SSD in 2015 and a 500 GB SSD in 2018. It used to make sense to buy a smaller, cheaper SSD to run your operating system and your most important apps and to buy a large, cheap hard drive for storing large files, but these days it’s relatively affordable to buy a single large SSD for everything.

Right now, most people should get a 500 GB SSD, which should be more than enough for your operating system, all your apps, a couple of games, and a good-sized photo, video, and music collection. If you’re buying a drive for a gaming PC, you should buy a 1 TB SSD instead, since game sizes are only going to get larger as games designed for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are released on the PC. If at all possible, avoid choosing an SSD with 250 GB or less of storage; both 128 GB and 250 GB drives are slower and significantly less cost-effective than larger drives. If you know you’ll be installing a ton of games or working with lots of large video or photo files, or if you already have a 500 GB SSD that’s more than 70% full, consider a 1 TB drive instead.

If you’re buying a new computer from a company like Dell, HP, or Lenovo, you can sometimes save money by ordering a computer with a smaller SSD or a mechanical hard drive and replacing that with a larger SSD yourself. Be careful, though: Some laptop manufacturers make it very difficult to upgrade the drive, either soldering the included storage to the motherboard or requiring complicated and potentially warranty-voiding disassembly to gain access to the SSD. Before going this route, confirm that your new laptop is easily upgradable.

Drives with larger capacities also tend to be faster. That’s because much of an SSD’s speed advantage comes from parallelization—a drive with multiple flash-memory chips can read from and write to them at the same time, boosting speeds. If your drive has fewer memory chips than your controller can write to at once (that is, if it has a lower capacity), it isn’t as fast as it could be. Although a 500 GB SSD isn’t bad in this regard, you will get the best speeds from a 1 TB or 2 TB drive.

For the latest update to this guide, we checked SSD review sites and retailers such as Amazon and Newegg to find drives that had been released since our last major update. We then consulted trusted third-party reviews and manufacturer product pages to compare the drives based on the following criteria:

• A good price: More-expensive SSDs are often better SSDs, but you shouldn’t overpay to get extra performance or other features you likely wouldn’t notice or use.
• Performance: Speed is the main reason to buy an SSD, after all. We checked reviews to make sure that the drives hit their advertised performance figures and that they would continue to feel speedy over time.
• Capacity at or above 500 GB: For most people, 500 GB offers the best mix of value, capacity, and speed. Although 1 TB drives usually offer better performance and cost a little less per gigabyte than 500 GB drives, they’re still overkill for most people unless you’re routinely installing lots of huge games at once or working with large photo and video files.
• A decent warranty: Most SSDs come with five-year warranties, and there’s no good reason to settle for anything shorter.
• Durability: You can write to flash-memory cells only so many times before they wear out—manufacturers express this as TBW, or the minimum number of terabytes that can be written before the drive will fail. This rating is higher for larger drives since they have more flash-memory cells to write to; for 500 GB drives, a rating of 300 TBW is fairly common. Although most people will never get anywhere near that limit during the normal lifetime of a drive, higher endurance is a plus.
• Software: The best SSDs come with free data-migration software that can help you transfer your operating system and apps to a new drive without having to start fresh. They should also offer software that can handle firmware updates and show you detailed information about the drive’s status and monitor its health.
• Native support for drive-encryption acceleration: This feature is primarily important for businesses with specific data-privacy requirements, and we didn’t disqualify SSDs that didn’t include it, but it’s a nice bonus for the privacy-minded. Your operating system can still encrypt drives without such support, but that results in a slightly greater hit to performance.

We then read reviews from the sites that we know do great SSD testing—primarily AnandTech, but also CNET, Tom’s Hardware, The SSD Review, StorageReview, The Tech Report, and a few others—and pored over benchmarks. We also ran some benchmarks of our own, and we installed any software included with the SSDs to evaluate the features and ease of use.

Top pick

Samsung SSD 980 (500 GB NVMe)

The Best SSD

For most people, there’s little reason to spend more than the price of the Samsung 980. It is fast, comes with good software, and has a five-year warranty from a reputable brand.

Buying Options

$40 from Best Buy

$60 from Amazon

$75 from Walmart

Samsung’s SSD 980 is an NVMe SSD that’s five to six times faster than the best SATA drives, even though the drives usually cost the same. This makes it a great, affordable option whether you’re building a new computer or upgrading the storage in one that’s two or three years old. The 980’s peak speeds are close in most circumstances to those of more expensive drives like the the SK Hynix Gold P31 and Crucial P5, but the 980 is more than fast enough for almost every task that people do most often on their computers.

We generally recommend the 500 GB version, but the 980 also comes in 1 TB and 2 TB variants if you need more space; the larger versions of the drive are also much faster, which is true for most SSDs. Samsung covers all versions with a five-year warranty, and the 500 GB version has a 300 TBW durability rating, in line with more expensive drives.

Reviewers acknowledge that the 980 isn’t the fastest PCI Express SSD you can buy. It slows down if you’re moving big files around; few people will encounter this in day-to-day use, but it might not be the best choice for professionals working with large video files.¹

The Samsung SSD 980 comes with Samsung’s excellent Magician software for monitoring drive health or installing firmware updates, and you can also find Samsung’s Data Migration Software on the Samsung SSD support site to move your files or clone your existing drive if you don’t want to move things manually or start over with a new installation of Windows.

Runner-up

SK Hynix Gold P31 (500 GB NVMe)

Great power efficiency

The Gold P31 is from a lesser-known manufacturer, but reviewers praise its good performance and low power consumption, both qualities that make it a better fit for laptops.

Buying Options

$61 from Amazon

Crucial P5 (500 GB NVMe)

Better for large files

Recent price drops have made Crucial’s P5 a decent choice if you want solid all-around performance, encryption support, and good software tools, and it’s faster than our other picks when working with large multi-gigabyte files.

Buying Options

Buy from Amazon

$74 from Walmart

May be out of stock

The Samsung SSD 980 is a fast enough SSD for just about anyone. But if you regularly export large video files or move around large multi-gigabyte folders, or if you’re frustrated with the amount of time you spend waiting on your games’ load screens, you can get faster SSD performance without stepping all the way up to an expensive professional-level drive. The SK Hynix Gold P31, and the Crucial P5 both perform a bit better than the 980 and also come with decent software, five-year warranties, and other benefits.

According to reviewers, both of these drives generally outperform the Samsung SSD 980 in loading games, copying large file folders, decompressing files, and running a variety of storage benchmarks. If you don’t want to just buy whichever of them is cheapest at the time, consider the following pros and cons for each drive:

• According to Tom’s Hardware, the SK Hynix Gold P31 has exceptionally low power consumption, which might make it a better choice for a laptop. (You can expect to gain only minutes, rather than hours, of battery life, though; a laptop’s processor and screen both have more to do with how long its battery lasts.) This drive also surpasses the others in endurance rating, but it doesn’t come in a 256 GB or 2 TB capacity, and its software isn’t as good as Samsung’s, Crucial’s, or WD’s.
• Recent price drops have made the Crucial P5 a better deal than it was at launch—it rarely tops the performance charts, but it’s a good all-rounder with useful software and hardware encryption support. But reviewers note that it can run hot, so it might not be the best fit for a laptop.

Also great

Crucial MX500 (500 GB SATA)

For older computers (SATA)

A great choice for an older computer, the Crucial MX500 offers good performance, useful software, a five-year warranty, and hardware encryption support for a decent price.

Buying Options

$50 from Amazon

$51 from Walmart

$52 from Best Buy

Western Digital WD Blue 3D NAND (500 GB SATA)

For older computers (SATA)

Suitable for an older computer, the WD Blue 3D NAND performs well and comes with useful software and a five-year warranty, but it lacks hardware encryption support.

Buying Options

$50 from Amazon

If you’re upgrading an older laptop or desktop that can’t use an M.2 NVMe SSD as we recommend above—a group that includes most computers made before 2016 or so—buy the 500 GB Crucial MX500 or the Western Digital WD Blue 3D NAND, whichever model is priced the lowest. Each of these drives maxes out the older SATA interface, so you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between them in daily use. Both are available in both 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA versions, come with useful data-migration and drive-management software, and have five-year warranties. None of these SSDs come in an mSATA version, so if you’re using an older ultrabook that needs such a drive, your best option as of this writing is Kingston’s KC600.

Of the two SSDs we recommend for older computers, the WD Blue has marginally better speed and endurance ratings, but the MX500 includes hardware encryption support. For the kinds of older and more lightly used computers that need SATA drives, you won’t notice a speed difference, and you’re unlikely to run up against either drive’s relatively low endurance rating inside of the five-year warranty period.

Also great

Samsung 980 Pro (1 TB NVMe)

For PS5 owners

PlayStation 5 owners who want to upgrade their system’s storage need to buy a fast, expensive PCI Express 4.0 SSD to meet Sony’s storage requirements. The 980 Pro is a speedy drive that doesn’t run as hot as some competitors.

Buying Options

$170$120 from Amazon (2 TB NVMe)

You save $50 (29%)

$170$120 from Best Buy (2 TB NVMe)

You save $50 (29%)

$135 from Amazon

$164 from Best Buy

$135 from Walmart

When you’re upgrading a PC (or even when you’re building a new one), we don’t think most people need to spend extra money on an SSD that uses PCI Express 4.0. SSDs that use PCI Express 3.0 cost a lot less, and they’re still plenty fast at everything from booting your computer to saving large video files or loading games. But if you want to expand the internal storage of your PlayStation 5, you’ll need a PCIe 4.0 drive to meet Sony’s stringent performance requirements; we haven’t tested it in a PS5 specifically, but the 1 TB version of Samsung’s 980 Pro is the drive we’d buy (along with an aftermarket heatsink like this or this) based on how it performs in PCs.

The 980 Pro is currently Samsung’s fastest, best SSD, and it’s priced to match: Its peak speeds are around twice as fast as the Samsung SSD 980, but it’s also twice as expensive. We’d recommend it over competing PCIe 4.0 drives like Western Digital’s WD Black SN850 because according to reviewers like Sean Webster at Tom’s Hardware, the 980 Pro doesn’t get as hot while you’re using it. You always want to keep your components from overheating to preserve peak performance and prolong their lifespans, but the PS5 runs hot, so anything you can do to cool things down is worth doing. Sony has stated that NVMe drives installed in the PS5 will need a heatsink, and while most higher-end drives already have them, if yours doesn’t, we recommend installing a small, cheap heatsink on top of the SSD to cool things down; either of these simple, easy-to-install models from icepc should be compatible with the 980 Pro. If you buy a different heatsink (or an SSD with a heatsink already attached), make sure it will physically fit inside the console using the measurements on Sony’s SSD requirements page.

If you’re not desperate to upgrade your PS5’s storage, it might still be a good idea to wait. The software update that enables SSD support is currently in beta, which means it may introduce bugs or cause other problems with your games. Other, cheaper SSDs that can meet Sony’s performance requirements may also be released in the next year or so, reducing the total cost of the storage upgrade. As usual, you shouldn’t rush to be the first person to adopt a new technology unless you’re willing to put up with the potential problems that come with it.

If you want to copy your existing hard drive over to your SSD before you install it, you need cloning software and sometimes additional hardware. Most of our recommended SSDs come with access to Windows-only cloning software: Western Digital and Crucial offer versions of Acronis True Image, and Samsung and SK Hynix offer their own data-migration software. Otherwise, you can use the free MiniTool Partition Wizard.

You also need a way to connect your new drive to your computer while you’re cloning the old one. If you’re buying an M.2 SSD, you should get an M.2 SATA–to–USB 3.0 adapter or enclosure; this enclosure will work for M.2 SATA SSDs, while this enclosure should work for M.2 NVMe SSDs.

If your desktop has room and you’re using a 2.5-inch SATA SSD, you need only to hook up the SSD to spare power and data cables in your PC. But laptop owners with 2.5-inch SATA drives need a SATA-to-USB enclosure or adapter. Some SSDs come with upgrade kits that include a SATA-to-USB adapter, but getting the drive-only version and buying an enclosure separately is usually less expensive.

After you’ve swapped drives, you can put your old laptop drive in a USB enclosure (such as the one you may have used for the new SSD while cloning) and use it for backup, if you’d like. Just be careful about doing this with spinning hard drives that are more than a few years old—it’s risky to store your backups on a drive that might fail.

Modern Macs—anything introduced in or after 2016—are not built to have their SSDs upgraded. Either they’re difficult to open up, they use proprietary drives that you can’t replace with the standard M.2 or SATA SSDs we recommend, or they don’t have removable storage at all. That’s doubly frustrating because Apple’s SSD upgrade prices are much higher than even the most expensive drives for PCs. Whether you’re buying a new Mac or trying to add storage to an existing one, your best and most economical option is probably a portable SSD.

Old MacBook Air and Pro models built between 2012 and 2015 can still be upgraded, with caveats (though it’s generally not worth the effort to upgrade anything much older, since those Macs can’t run currently supported versions of macOS). The 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro can use standard 2.5-inch SATA SSDs like the Crucial MX500. And OWC sells SATA and PCI Express SSDs compatible with the proprietary connectors used in MacBook Airs and Pros—on the OWC website, you can choose your Mac to see the available options. If you don’t know which Mac you have, Apple has a page that can help you out.

The most common version of the PCI Express protocol is still version 3.0, but version 4.0 offers twice as much theoretical bandwidth. Aside from brand-new desktop PCs using the latest Intel and AMD processors, most computers still can’t take advantage of PCIe 4.0 SSDs; the best ones also tend to be expensive, and the cheaper ones don’t take full advantage of the additional speed. But we’ll continue to monitor these drives as prices come down and PCIe 4.0 becomes more widely available.

Western Digital’s WD Black SN750 SE (which despite the name has essentially nothing in common with the standard SN750) is a budget PCIe 4.0 SSD that’s priced closer to PCIe 3.0 drives like the Samsung SSD 980. According to its spec sheet, it’s definitely competitive with the SSD 980, but it may not be fast enough to take full advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface—we’ll need to wait for more reviews to assess its real-world performance.

Crucial’s P5 Plus is a version of the P5 that has been upgraded to take advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface, with listed read and write speeds nearly twice as fast as the regular P5. The drive hasn’t been released (or even officially announced) yet, but leaked retail listings suggest it will arrive soon.

M.2 NVMe SSDs

The Western Digital SN550 was previously our main SSD pick. However, Western Digital recently changed the NAND flash used in the drive (one of two kinds of storage in an SSD that make up the bulk of a drive’s capacity, but is slower than the faster flash memory most drives write to when you’re actively using a drive). This change has led to major performance reductions when copying larger files or many files at once. While many users won’t experience these speed reductions, there’s little reason to purchase the SN550 when more consistent drives are available at similar prices.

We don’t recommend PCI Express 4.0 SSDs like the Samsung 980 Pro or Western Digital WD Black SN850 for most people buying a drive for a PC, at least not yet. The only PCs that can take advantage of the extra speed are AMD desktops built within the past year or so and brand-new laptops with 11th-generation Intel Core processors—very new and relatively uncommon computers, in other words. And although these drives can work just fine in older computers that use PCI Express 3.0, in that situation they would perform only about as well as significantly cheaper previous-generation drives like the Samsung 970 Evo Plus.

Samsung’s 970 Evo Plus used to be an upgrade pick in this guide, and if you can find it for around the same price as a Samsung SSD 980 or a Crucial P5, you should buy the 970 Evo Plus instead—it’s a great performer, and includes the excellent SSD software and five-year warranty common to most Samsung drives. But at its typical pricing (around $95 for 500 GB), the cheaper SSDs offer a much better value.

Intel’s 670p SSD generally performs better than the WD SN550, our previous pick, but it’s also more expensive. Our upgrade picks offer more consistent speeds for about the same price, so you can skip the 670p unless you see it on sale for closer to what the SN550 costs.

We recommended the Seagate Barracuda 510 in a previous version of this guide. It performs well and has a five-year warranty and decent software support, but our upgrade picks provide better performance for the price, and the Barracuda 510 has gotten a bit harder to find since our original recommendation. We also recommended the Addlink S70 in a previous version of this guide, but it’s no longer as good a deal as it was in early 2020—our upgrade picks all offer as-good or better performance plus much better software support.

The Western Digital WD Black SN750 is an older SSD. It’s not a bad option, but our main picks all perform better for roughly the same cost.

The Seagate FireCuda 510 is similar in price and performance to the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. It also has a five-year warranty and a high, 650 TBW endurance rating (for the 500 GB version). But we think Samsung’s software package is better, and the FireCuda 510 doesn’t offer hardware encryption support like the 970 Evo Plus does.

A solid midrange SSD, the HP EX950 typically costs about the same as our upgrade picks, and it’s a perfectly fine option especially if you find it on sale for less money. But it’s not as fast as our upgrade picks, and HP doesn’t provide software for its SSDs.

The Crucial P1 is an older drive that’s much slower than the Samsung SSD 980. Its lack of drive-encryption support and its relatively low 100 TBW endurance rating are other reasons not to buy it. Crucial’s P2 is a budget-focused follow-up that costs about the same as the Samsung SSD 980 but doesn’t perform nearly as well.

Samsung’s 970 Pro is usually overkill even for pros, and we recommend it only if you need the fastest drive money can buy. The 970 Pro uses multilevel cell (MLC) flash and doesn’t rely on TurboWrite or Dynamic Write Acceleration caches for speed, so it offers faster and more consistent performance if you’re writing tons of data at a time, and its endurance rating is twice has high as that of the 970 Evo Plus (though both Samsung drives have the same five-year warranty). But you pay more for an MLC drive: The 970 Pro regularly costs more than twice as much as the already relatively pricey 970 Evo Plus does at the same capacities.

The Inland Premium, Seagate Barracuda Q5, Mushkin Pilot-E, Kingston NV1, Patriot P300, and Patriot Viper VPN100 all have three-year warranties. SSDs with five-year warranties are much more common and don’t cost more, so avoid these.

The Corsair Force MP510, HP EX920, Intel 600p, Plextor M8Pe, Samsung 960 Pro, Samsung 970 Evo (not the Evo Plus), and SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe 3D SSD are all older models that are still available. They’re usually either pricier or slower than our current picks (sometimes both), and generally you should avoid them in favor of more recent drives.

SATA and M.2 SATA SSDs

Gobs and gobs of 2.5-inch SATA SSDs are out there, and most of them have a hard time standing out from the crowd. Most are fine, and if you encounter a great deal on one, you won’t be unhappy. But at current prices, there’s little reason to consider them over our main picks.

If you do need an mSATA SSD, your options are limited, but Kingston’s SSDNOW UV500 has a five-year warranty, supports hardware encryption acceleration, and comes from an established company with a good reputation (most mSATA SSDs currently available at retailers are from no-name manufacturers). But because mSATA drives are more expensive than 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, you should buy an mSATA drive only if you have to.

We used to recommend Samsung’s 860 Evo alongside the Crucial MX500 and WD Blue 3D NAND, but both it (and its newer, ever-so-slightly faster replacement, the 870 Evo) are consistently more expensive than either of those drives, and most people won’t notice the marginally better performance or endurance ratings. They’re not worth the extra money, given the limits of the aging SATA interface.

SanDisk’s Ultra 3D is actually identical to the Western Digital WD Blue 3D NAND we recommend; Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016. But the WD Blue has an M.2 version whereas the SanDisk comes in only a 2.5-inch SATA version, and the WD Blue tends to be a few dollars cheaper.

Although Samsung’s 860 Pro is a top-of-the-line SATA drive with high endurance and a five-year warranty, at this point people who want a faster, better SSD than our main picks should be looking at NVMe SSDs, not SATA models. Drives like the Crucial MX500 are significantly cheaper but not all that much slower.

Compared with the MX500, Crucial’s BX500 has slower performance, a shorter (three-year) warranty, and no hardware encryption support. It might be a good choice if you need an extremely inexpensive low-capacity drive—a 120 GB version costs less than $40—but the 480 GB version isn’t much cheaper than our top picks.

Samsung’s 860 QVO and 870 QVO are meant to be relatively affordable drives for people who need lots of space—both are available in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities, and the 870 QVO goes all the way up to 8 TB. They perform well for SATA drives. But they have only a three-year warranty and aren’t any cheaper than the 1 TB versions of our SATA drive picks. There’s no reason to buy either of them unless you need something bigger than 1 TB but don’t want a spinning hard drive.

Adata’s Ultimate SU800 is good enough and readily available, but it runs slower than our main picks, has a shorter three-year warranty, and lacks encryption support.