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The question is, which hard drive should you buy? Does performance matter, or should you just go for the cheapest model? Here’s our verdict on five of the best hard disk models you can buy. How to buy the best hard disk for you Should I buy an HDD or an SSD? Solid-state drives come in all shapes and sizes and are built for almost every purpose. Whether you need a drive whose first priority is dollar-savings, or one that will load up a 4K movie in less than half a second, there's an SSD made for the job. In those tests, drives of every bus type, from PCIe 5.0 down to SATA 3.0, often can trade blows, and the best among them can take top marks away from drives that are much more expensive per gigabyte. If you're trying to get the most gaming, application, or operating system performance for the lowest cost per gig, you'll even find SATA-based options out there that remain competitive enough for most uses.
When expanding your PS5’s storage, you’ll want to grab an SSD that fits the console’s internal M.2 port rather than a USB drive, as PS5 games can’t be played from an external drive. And while installing one of the best SSDs will require some work, you don’t need to be a hardware aficionado. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 2,000MB/s | Sequential write speed: 2,000MB/s | NAND type: WD TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros: is a huge data capacity and will allow you to store everything your family can throw at it. Hundreds of albums of family photos and home movies can sit comfortably alongside your ever-expanding film and music collection. Hours Upon Hour Of Video 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. 2.5-Inch SSDs: The Basic Drive The PNY XLR8 gaming kit is more peculiar than other PS5 SSDs. Included is the PNY XLR8 SSD, which boasts a respectable 7,500 MB/s read speed and 5,650 MB/s write speed. But the real draw is the bespoke heatsink mounted to the underside of a plastic shield that replaces the PS5’s original SSD slot cover.
So, Which Internal SSD Should I Buy?
That said, those buying an SSD for professional applications such as filmmaking, server hosting, or anything else that involves large file transfers of the magnitude of hundreds of gigabytes daily will want to choose a drive that can withstand that kind of punishment for months, even years on end. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) M.2 slots are now common in new desktop motherboards and practically universal in late-model laptops. M.2 solid-state drives are the 2.5-inch drive distilled to its essence, extremely minimal in their design and implementation. But they're also the most complicated to understand before you buy. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado) Intel Optane Memory drives, on the other hand, can massively accelerate a fully mechanical drive. These resemble M.2 SSDs, and plug into the same slot on the motherboard, but instead of acting like a separate drive they become an ultra-fast cache for the main HDD. Unlike hybrid drives, we’ve seen Optane-boosted hard disks exceed 1,500MB/sec read speeds, so they’re great for accelerating a PC that only has HDD storage; you don’t have to move your Windows installation over, either. The SATA interface is capable of sequentially reading and writing a theoretical maximum of 600MBps in an ideal scenario, minus a bit for overhead processes. Most of our testing has shown that the average SATA drive tops out at roughly 500MBps to 550MBps; in sequential tasks, the real-world difference between the best SATA drive and a merely average one is pretty small. Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 6,600MB/s | Sequential write speed: 5,000MB/s | NAND type: Micron TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros:
M.2 drives also come in different lengths. Physically, the most common of five M.2 SSD sizes is what's known as Type-2280, shorthand for 22 millimeters wide and 80mm long. (All SSDs you'll see for consumer PC upgrades are 22mm wide; lengths range from 30mm to 110mm.) Most are merely circuit boards with flash memory and controller chips on them, but some M.2 drives (especially those of the PCI Express 4.0 variety) now ship with relatively large heatsinks mounted on top to keep them cool, or in the box as accessories. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado) Still, it does make a difference, especially to write performance: we recorded decent read speeds of 188MB/sec, and a very good 208MB/sec for sustained writes. Random-access write performance was excellent at 4.9MB/sec: most drives struggle to hit 2MB/sec, and even the BarraCuda Pro only managed 3.2MB/sec. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply.
Crucial T700
Then there's the difference between PCI Express generations. As you'd expect, drives speed up through each successive generation. PCIe 4.0 set peak-sequential speed records for consumer storage, and the first PCIe 5.0 drives have predictably blown these records away. PCIe 4.0 requires support from the specific desktop or laptop platform. PCIe 4.0 came to market with third- and fourth-generation Ryzen processors from AMD, and PCI Express 4.0 support is now available on the Intel side with Intel 500 Series chipset and later platforms with 11th to 14th Generation CPUs on the desktop. (It's also part of the company's mobile chip platforms from the 11th Generation onward. Indeed, the very latest desktop Intel platforms support the emerging PCIe 5.0 , whose system requirements are more onerous than PCIe 4.0.) mSATA, short for mini-SATA, is a predecessor to the M.2 form factor. It was primarily built into laptops, though some older desktop motherboards may have an mSATA slot aboard. With mSATA, the slots and drives use only the SATA bus, unlike M.2's SATA and PCIe support. For all intents and purposes, mSATA is a dead end, though you might run into it if you have an older laptop or desktop. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)
And if you're simply replacing a hard drive as your boot drive, you'll love the speed boost whichever kind you go with. We guarantee it. The five-year warranty isn’t exactly anything special (almost all the SSDs on this list come with a similar guarantee), but it’s just the cherry on top of an SSD that essentially has everything the average PS5 player will need for a very competitive price. 2. Crucial P5 Plus Ebuyer's collection of 4TB internal drives are engineered by trusted manufacturers to deliver quality performance while emitting the lowest levels of waste noise and heat. Even PCIe 3.0 is significantly faster than SATA in straight-up sequential tests, though. But that's just sequential speeds, and how fast a drive can copy a folder from one part of itself to another isn't all that matters these days. There's also the issue of capacity,This 4TB drive is the largest model in the BarraCuda series, and while it’s not the most capacious you can get – the Western Digital Red family goes up to 12TB – it should provide more than enough storage for personal use. It’s not the fastest disk out there, either: it uses just two 2TB platters, combined with 256MB of cache, to deliver read and write speeds of around 165MB/sec. With so much data to take care of, you need an internal storage drive that is spacious enough to comfortably house all of this information and stable enough to allow daily strenuous use without fail. This is pricier than a lot of 6TB hard disks, even by the standards of those created specifically for use in NAS, as this is. Nonetheless, its high performance makes it a worthwhile investment: we measured it hitting a sequential read speed of 229MB/sec and a sequential write speed of 244MB/sec. It is important to be aware of the drive’s form factor, with 3.5” being the most common for the best HDDs (this is the only type we cover). If you need 2.5”, your options are more limited, especially for capacity. Otherwise, your computer case’s ability to house a certain number of 3.5” drives might be your primary limitation. Still, it’s impressive, and if you’re tempted don’t be won over by the cheaper non-heatsink model. The absence of thermal distribution will limit the read and write speeds the SSD can sustain. If you’re going to reach for the moon, you may as well as splash the cash to get there. 4. Seagate FireCuda 530
The maximum sequential read speed that's theoretically possible for a SATA drive is 600MBps, though as we said above, we haven't seen any drives reach that limit even in ideal testing conditions. The theoretical peak sequential read speed for PCI Express 3.0 x4 drives is much faster—3,940MBps, although the fastest one we've tested in-house is the Samsung SSD 870 EVO, which topped out at 3,372MBps read speed in the Crystal DiskMark 6 benchmark. PCI Express 5.0 is the latest and by far the fastest. It offers substantial throughput increases, with maximum read and write speeds of up to 14,000MBps, effectively double those of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. Only the latest high-end desktops support this bus off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from scratch or perform a motherboard and CPU transplant on an existing desktop. Intel users will need a 12th or 13th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor on an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset. Note: The board must specifically have a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, too; not every board with chipset-level support does! (Also know: Laptops can't leverage the peak speeds of these drives, yet.)
How to buy the best hard disk for you
The ever-decreasing price of solid state drives (SSDs) means that traditional hard disks are less commonplace than they once were. However, as media libraries grow larger, and 4K video becomes commonplace, there’s still a role for affordable, high-capacity storage – and that’s where hard drives are at their strongest. Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. Performance is hugely important for your system drive, since Windows is constantly reading and writing dozens of files at once. For a storage drive, it’s much less of an issue. It’s likely that it’ll only be required to access one or two data files at a time, and even the slowest drive is easily fast enough to stream high-definition movies without breaking a sweat. For a desktop, the right SSD to buy depends much more on what you are doing with your computer, and what your aim is. 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. 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.
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