Samsung 860 PRO 4 TB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (MZ-76P4T0), Black

Product Information

On average, an internal SSD can cost anything from 8 cents per gigabyte for a basic drive to 50-plus cents per gigabyte for drives made specifically for filmmakers or other niche use cases. A general rule is that smaller drives (anything under 240GB) will cost more per gigabyte, getting cheaper as you go up to the 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacity tiers. Sometimes, though, a 4TB or 8TB drive will demand a price premium per gigabyte over the smaller-capacity models in a line. (Credit: Kyle Cobian) In those tests, drives of every bus type, from PCIe 5.0 down to SATA 3.0, often can trade blows, and the best among them can take top marks away from drives that are much more expensive per gigabyte. If you're trying to get the most gaming, application, or operating system performance for the lowest cost per gig, you'll even find SATA-based options out there that remain competitive enough for most uses. Technology that was previously reserved for enterprise customers and the PC performance elite has gained the common touch, with mainstream desktops and laptops now featuring SSDs rather than hard drives as primary storage choices. And adding an internal SSD to an older PC as a new boot drive remains a great, cost-effective upgrade. If you're still relying on spinning metal, you'll find it one of the easiest ways to an instant, undeniable speed boost. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

The Seagate Game Drive PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD was made specifically for next-gen consoles—the PS5 in particular. And it doesn’t disappoint. Instead of HMB, it features DRAM for primary caching duties, which is practically essential for Sony’s console system. This is important because the PS5 doesn’t support HMB, so a drive such as this with DRAM cache is a must. The drive comes in 1TB and 2TB models, which means you’ll have plenty of space to store all of your games should you need it. Random Read (4 KB, QD1) Up to 13,000 IOPS Random Read * Performance may vary based on system hardware & configuration ** Measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated

Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. The era of PCIe 5.0 SSDs is upon us, propelling us to new heights of stratospheric SSD performance. Blazing-fast PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, which offer up to twice the sequential speeds of the older PCIe 4.0 standard, are now supported with Intel and AMD's current platforms, the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 and 13th-Gen Raptor Lake. And if you're simply replacing a hard drive as your boot drive, you'll love the speed boost whichever kind you go with. We guarantee it. But big drives don't come cheap (especially when you're talking about SSDs rather than hard drives), so knowing the value of an SSD and how much it costs per gigabyte is another important factor to weigh in your next upgrade. Whether it's 128GB or 4TB (or any capacity, really), the cost per gigabyte will give you a baseline to compare one drive against another and whether or not it looks like a good value based on its features and durability rating.

While the Seagate Game Drive is optimized for a PS5, it’s no slouch as a regular SSD either. In our speed tests it did remarkably well, earning the spot as the second-fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD with random ops that we’ve ever tested. Seagate also provides a generous five-year warranty with the drive and it has an astounding 1,275TBW rating—more than double the industry norm. The drive is a bit pricey, but the special optimizations for PS5 means that console owners can rest easy knowing that their money is going to good use with the Seagate Game Drive.

Crucial P3

That said, while almost any SSD is much faster than any hard drive, not all SSDs are created equal—not by a long shot. SSD interfaces have evolved greatly over the last few years, and SSDs themselves are taking on different shapes and core technologies. The combination of the Phison E18 controller and 176-layer TLC flash from Micron is a match made in heaven: unrivaled peak performance and, with the right cache design as on the Gaming model, strong sustained performance. That is ideal for workstation tasks, and Inland’s drives are cheaper than competitor offerings while maintaining a decent warranty. This is a barebones drive but will get the job done.