The SSD revolution
Luxury or commodity?
EDITORIAL
Remember when SSDs were sexy? That moment your very first SATA SSD loaded up Windows in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Your videos for viewing or editing hitting the screen mere moments after you clicked the mouse button. Game levels loading quicker than your mates so you get get in there first. What a blissful time.
And don’t get me started on the wonders of the form factor. That little sliver of storage that hides away in your case without a single cable necessary. Just so nice. Apart from M.2 screws, which are now the most annoying little bastards of any new PC build. But at least the motherboard manufacturers are slowly introducing smarter ways to plug these things in.
Since then we’ve escalated the gains massively with PCIe SSDs, with each new generation coming close to doubling the speeds of the last. It’s all so good we’ve become a bit passé about it all – which was the entire point. The hard drive was the last great PC bottleneck to be unplugged. We live in a new era of system responsiveness that’s just so nice we take it for granted.
Which brings us to now. We’re right on the cusp of the newest PCIe Gen 5 SSD standard, which will once again double the performance. You’ll need a new Ryzen 7000 or Intel Raptor Lake system to start thinking about those, but they’re still super rare and pricey, so it’s still a Gen 4 world, and that’s just fine.
Perhaps you are planning a new build based on the new CPU platforms? It’ll need an SSD or two. Maybe your current rig is running short on capacity – after all, it wasn’t long ago that anything over 1TB was quite expensive. And there’s the tragic possibility that you have a nice SSD for your OS and main apps, complimented by a hideously slow hard drive for mass storage that makes you cry a little inside every time you hear it groan into life and the agonising wait for something to happen.
So – upgrade! We’ve done the hard yards in the labs this issue, hauling in 14 SSDs so you know what’s best for value and performance. Have a read, go invest a little bit of money, and enjoy the gains.
I hope the new year is off to a great start for you all, take care, readers.
“Don’t get me started on the wonders of the form factor. That little sliver of storage that hides away in your case without a single cable necessary. Just so nice. Apart from M.2 screws, which are now the most annoying little bastards of any new PC build.”