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When I sat down to write this article, I thought it would be straightforward: “Write an SSD guide,” my editor said. “Make some recommendations!” he said. What could be simpler?

It turns out, quite a bit — but the good thing about getting hip-deep into a product segment is that I get to wade back out and describe the thinking process that ought to go into choosing an SSD. This guide is written for those of you who bought a small SSD back in 2008-2010 and are now looking for an upgrade, as well as those who are hopping in for the first time and are looking for a basic primer.

What SSD should I buy? (The short answer)

If you’re a consumer who wants a high-capacity drive with high performance and you’re comfortable applying a drive firmware patch, buy a Samsung 840 Evo. Buy nothing smaller than 256GB unless you’re absolutely sure you won’t need it. If you don’t want TLC NAND (more on what TLC is later) but you do want a cheap high-capacity drive that doesn’t skimp on performance, Crucial’s M550 1TB is a good alternative.



Samsung 850 Pro SSD

Even those of you looking for a simple answer should be aware that performance can vary significantly between drive families — the 840 Evo 1TB and M550 1TB are roughly the same speed, but the 840 Evo 256GB is much faster than the M550 256GB. More data on this is shown below.

As of October 2014, and probably into 2015, if you want the highest performing drive money can buy today, buy a Samsung 850 Evo.

SSDs: What’s changed (and what hasn’t)

There have been several significant shifts in SSDs since the drives first began to hit the very top of the consumer market. First and foremost, prices have come down drastically. The cheapest SSDs are now close to 40 cents per gigabyte, while expensive high-performance drives are hitting around $1.

Second, drive performance has both improved and become more consistent. Back in the dawn of the SSD era, it wasn’t unusual to find test cases (typically random read/writes) where certain SSDs would fall off a proverbial cliff. In severe cases, SSDs might even lag traditional mechanical hard drives.

Third, SSD performance is hitting a significant wall. The SATA 6G interface that first debuted in 2010 is largely tapped — even modest drives are capable of saturating its 600MB/s (in practice, more like 550MB/s) in at least some tests. This is one reason why the manufacturer specs on two drives can be so similar, even when they perform quite differently in real-world tests.

One critical factor to keep in mind when buying a modern SSD is that capacity and performance are often linked — but the size and significance of that link varies greatly. The following chart from Tech Report’s review of the Adata SP610 illustrates this very well.




Look at Crucial’s M500 drive. At 240GB, it’s the slowest drive in TR’s data set. At 480GB, the same M500 family is nearly 60% faster. The M500 960GB variant is 11% faster yet, with the lowest overall price per GB. The M500 960GB is approximately 1.8x faster than the M500 240GB across Tech Report’s entire benchmark suite.

Now, contrast that against the 840 Evo family. While there’s still a gap between top and bottom, the 250GB Evo ranks in at 800% of standard HDD speed, the 500GB drive is around 940%, and the 840 Evo is around 980%. The gap between the top and bottom products is perhaps 20% as opposed to 80%.


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