SSD SUPERTEST

Here’s what you need to know.

It’s one of the most noticeable upgrades you can make. Here are the SSDs that belong in your gaming PC.

We’ve already seen steadily increasing SSD capacities and performance, but we’re about to hit a real step-change in the technology that will lay the foundation for the next generation.

One one hand, you might want to hold off on a new SSD purchase until the important new technologies have shaken out, but on the other it means the current crop of drives are as fast as you’re going to get without doing some serious upgrading elsewhere in your PC.

What’s changing?

This year’s SSDs are shifting away from the SATA interface, which has been limiting performance to 600MB/s, and away from the AHCI protocol. That aging standard is chock-full of unnecessary hoops current SSDs have to jump through, because it has to provide legacy support for conventional hard drives.

What’s coming in its place?

The new storage protocol is called Non-Volatile Media Express, or NVMe. It’s been designed from the ground up to cater to the performance and capabilities NAND flash memory offers, and not to the vagaries of old-style mechanical storage.

So I should wait for NVMe drives to arrive before upgrading to SSD?

While NVMe will introduce SSDs capable of hitting almost 2GB/s transfer speeds they’re not going to achieve that over the standard SATA interface. NVMe drives will be exclusively PCIe-based and that means they’ll be designed to run over either the M.2 or SATA Express storage interfaces.

So unless you have a motherboard with such connections, either a 9-series Haswell/Broadwell or X99 Haswell-E board, you’re looking at a full motherboard upgrade. And in that case I’d argue that if your current CPU is a quad-core, and anything less than five years old, you’re better off waiting for Intel’s Skylake platform to arrive in the second half of this year before doing any wholesale upgrading.

But I’ve already got PCIe slots in my motherboard, can’t I use those?

Actually yes. You will be able to pick up PCIe expansion cards with M.2 slots on them, so all is not lost if you want to get your hands on the next generation of SSD without starting afresh on your PC. It’s far from the ideal solution however. Using an expansion card to run your OS on can introduce problems of its own— sometimes getting a bootable setup from an add-in card can be a real pain. And it can still depend on your motherboard support too.

Is there any good news?

Of course! The good news is that we’re at a point in the life of the SSD where it has never been cheaper or available with such huge capacities. Half terabyte is perfectly serviceable amount of space for those of us who like to keep a number of games on the go at the same time, and means you won’t have to re-juggle your games library every five minutes.

We’ve also got 250GB drives that no longer struggle under the performance degradation they used to due to their capacity. Manufacturers have removed the reliability problem, offering ten year warranties on some models, and have even created drives that can work happily in rendering workstations without a workstation pricetag.