ROUND 4

Value

What price do you put on capacity or performance? That’s the conundrum you face when sizing up the value of the various storage options. You cannot maximize both attributes. Solid state prices have come down, but when it comes to GB/$, they’re still obliterated by traditional magnetic storage.

A $75 3TB hard disk, for instance, works out at around 40GB per dollar. Matching that capacity with an SSD will cost you roughly 10 times as much. Meanwhile, even the sweet spot of current SSD GB/$, which is probably the 1TB segment, only delivers roughly 3GB per dollar. And that’s for a budgetoriented SATA SSD. The fanciest M.2 drives look like even worse value.

Of course, shift your priorities toward performance, and the tables are resolutely turned. When it comes to random access performance, which is especially critical for everyday performance and responsiveness, SSDs can be over 100 times faster than magnetic drives. That said, the cheaper end of the SATA SSD spectrum probably gives you the best bang for buck. But take care to avoid the very lowliest, which often use cheap controllers intended for USB drives, to save money.

Winner: SATA SSD