GROUP TEST Comparing the best SSDs on the market

High capacity solid state storage investigated.

Solid state drives are— despite the lack of moving parts—the most dynamic technology on the PC scene right now. The difference a good SSD can make to your gaming PC is huge, especially if you’re currently booting from an old spinning-platter hard drive.

But I can buy a 2TB hard drive for half the price.

Capacity is the one thing traditional hard drives have got going for them. And if all you want that capacity for is storing old photos or music and videos, then a dog-slow hard drive is fine. But if you’re using a hard drive as your main boot device and the place where you store your games, you’re missing out.

What’s the big improvement?

It’s all about speed. The fact that with an SSD you can boot your PC in a matter of seconds rather than minutes should tell you all you need to know. As should the experience of sitting twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next map to load while everyone else on your chat stream is in there.

Can I get a large enough SSD to house my OS and my games?

Yes. This month’s supertest is specifically based on affordable half-terabyte drives and since Windows only takes up around 30GB, you’ve got a lot of fast storage space left for your games.

That’s the great thing about SSDs right now: the technology is continually improving, so prices are tumbling on an almost daily basis. And not just the slower, older drives either. Companies such as Crucial and Samsung are making it their business to drive down prices of new, competitive, high-capacity SSDs.

Really? Why are these manufacturers being so generous?

Because right now the SSD market is new and competitive, and big businesses hate that. So they’re driving prices down to try to force the smaller companies out. The big names can afford to do this because they’re also memory manufacturers, and memory is the most volatile SSD component in terms of price. Crucial’s parent company, Micron, is one of the largest creators of memory around, and Samsung is another. If you can build your SSD completely in-house then you command the price of your own drive. Other SSD manufacturers have to buy the components they use and so can’t be quite as aggressive on price. It’s possible, as a result of this, that we’ll end up with just a few big names in the SSD market—as happened in the hard drive market, and as will eventually happen to pretty much every other part of PC componentry. But right now it’s creating a situation that’s advantageous to us.

If the SSD market is such a fastchanging one, won’t these drives quickly become obsolete?

It’s true new storage connections are on the way, such as the M.2 interface in the new Z97 motherboards reviewed in these pages last month, but the SATA interface most SSDs are currently based on will be around for the foreseeable future. And since current SATA SSD technology is already at the limit of its performance, no SATA SSD released later this year is likely to be much faster than the selection I’ve reviewed for you over the page.