ROUND 5

Durability

This is the most contentious metric. Firstly, that’s because durability can mean different things. For a portable PC, a solid-state drive is a huge bonus, and has the potential to be far more robust than a fragile magnetic drive, with spinning platter and moving read heads.

For a desktop PC, where physical shocks and exposure to extreme temperatures are less common, durability is all about the ability to soak up a lot of bandwidth, without losing performance and capacity, or failing.

The early days of SSDs were grim in that regard. Outright failure wasn’t that common, but a drop-off in performance was inevitable over time. Six months of heavy use could truly hammer those first SSDs. Since then, multiple technologies, including advance wear leveling and garbage collection routines, have dramatically improved the situation. Of course, the performance of hard drives can go off over time, too, with data fragmentation. But that’s usually fixable with a little defragging. Overall, however, the very best M.2 SSDs can be had with warranties and life expectancies of around five years, even with very heavy workloads. On balance, they’re probably now the most robust storage technology.

Winner: M.2 NVMe