SATA DRIVES
Serial ATA drives are now showing their age in terms of speed, but they still offer an easy way to expand storage.
At the start of this Labs, we said that SATA drives couldn’t cut it any more. While SSD SATA drives are much faster than their mechanical counterparts, they’re still exceptionally slow by modern standards; just look at the WD Green SATA M.2 drive opposite. That said, a SATA drive is better than nothing if you have an older laptop or a desktop computer that needs more storage space and has no spare M.2 ports.
We haven’t reviewed any new models in this group test for one simple reason: there aren’t any. The market has hit the limit of what SATA can do. Simply put, there will be no improvements in this technology, and the best drives for the connection have already been released.
The issue is that the SATA interface is slow and designed for mechanical drives. Using faster memory chips and saddling them with a SATA interface would be pointless, which explains why there’s been no further development of SATA SSDs.
To save you time looking up what’s available, we’ve included here some details of the best SATA SSDs from the previous Labs test. All three scored four out of five originally, and all are still currently available.
There’s very little between them in terms of performance, and the minor differences in speed make it hard to choose one drive over another. The main differences are in price, and the best thing you can do is buy the largest drive you can afford for the least amount of money.
Above, we’ve got the key information in the table, while the performance graphs show on the left you how the drives stack up and let you compare the performance of SATA drives to the M.2 NVMe drives we’ve reviewed elsewhere.