View from the Labs
Don’t get sucked into comparing specs and choosing the very top models, argues David. Ultimately, it’s size and value for money that matter.
It’s almost impossible to find a new computer or laptop running a mechanical hard disk. The technology now seems to be relegated to hard disk TV recorders, such as Sky Q, and NAS drives. Everyone else has gone solid state, and that’s for good reason: the drives are faster, use less power, take up less room and make no noise.
With the move has come the issue of more choice. Mechanical hard disks were, at least, simple. Sure, there were some variations in speed and transfer rates, but looking back, the actual differences between drives were minor. For the most part, you could make your decision based on the capacity you needed, and chuck in another hard disk when that filled up.
For a long time, SSD owners would look at the price they’d paid for their drive and cry at how little storage that bought them. That’s largely gone now, because SSDs have at least caught up with mechanical capacity, while prices for 1TB drives (a sensible amount of storage for most people) are no longer eye-watering.
But there’s still the issue of speed. The difference between the fastest and slowest SSDs is vast. Then there are a whole lot of other choices to make, including whether upgrading to that 2TB drive is really worth the extra cash, and which version of PCI-E you should be buying.
Life has become a lot more complicated, it would seem, which means it’s worth spending as much time choosing storage as we would a processor or motherboard. Ask yourself this: what’s more important about your computer, what it physically is, or what it stores? After all, our photos, documents and lives are all digital, so storage is just about the most important thing we will buy.
The thing is not to get caught up too much on the specs, but to compromise and get the right drive for you. The fastest SSD will only ever go flat out if you have the kind of rig and applications to push it that way. Is it worth, say, compromising on space to get faster access to a drive that will be filled immediately? I’d say it isn’t.
Benchmarks are important, but the reviews here go into the detail and nuance of finding the right drive. The best advice I can give is to choose the right amount of storage first, then find the fastest drive you can afford, rather than doing it the other way round.