Introduction
Over the past six months or so, the retail cost of NAND client SSD storage has plummeted. For most client machines this primarily affects M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs and 2.5″ SATA SSDs. The price per gigabyte of storage space has gone down dramatically, to about 70-90 cents/GB. Because of this, it is time to Upgrade Your PC Storage!
The main reason there is some urgency here is because NAND prices are forecasted to rise in 2024. Another reason is that there are still a lot of holiday-related sale prices that you can take advantage of right now. If you wait too long, you will be paying more than you would have by upgrading your storage now instead of in a few months.
Upgrade Your PC Storage!
What do I mean when I say “Upgrade Your PC Storage”? Well, I have several ideas in mind. These include:
- Upgrading from a magnetic hard drive or older 2.5″ SATA SSD to an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
- Upgrading from a small capacity SSD to a larger capacity SSD
- Add one or more additional SSDs to your system
Upgrading to an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Hopefully you are not still using a conventional SATA magnetic hard drive for your boot disk at the end of 2023. If you are, upgrading to nearly any kind of SSD will make a huge impact on how fast your system “feels” doing common daily tasks. Honestly, upgrading from a magnetic hard drive is usually the best thing you can do to improve an older system!
Unless your system is pretty old, you are probably using a 2.5″ SATA AHCI SSD or an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD as your boot drive. For most daily tasks, you won’t notice a large performance difference between a 2.5″ SATA AHCI SSD and an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.
Despite this, M.2 PCIe drives perform much better for some tasks compared to older 2.5″ SATA AHCI SSDs. There is essentially no extra cost per GB for M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs compared to 2.5″ SATA AHCI SSDs, and they have several advantages. These include being smaller and lighter, and not having to deal with SATA data and power cables.
I still think that most people probably don’t really need a PCIe 5.0 SSD for typical daily tasks. The extra sequential bandwidth can be handy for some tasks, but there is still a significant price premium compared to PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Don’t let FOMO drive you into buying something you don’t need…
Upgrading to a Larger Capacity SSD
If you are running low on storage space, this is usually a pretty quick and easy upgrade. Large capacity SSDs actually cost less per GB and they are also faster than small capacity SSDs from the same vendor and product line. Right now, 2TB SSDs are in the sweet spot in terms of cost/GB, without being a very large purchase. You can simply clone your old drive to a larger capacity drive and then swap them out.
Adding Additional SSDs
Since NAND SSDs are so affordable right now, it may make sense to add one or more additional SSDs to your system. Doing this is very quick and easy in most systems. With a desktop system, your motherboard may have some unused M.2 slots or SATA ports. Most laptops only have one M.2 slot or one 2.5″ SATA drive bay.
Before you do anything, you should take a look at your motherboard manual to see what happens as you use more M.2 slots and SATA ports. It is very common for PCIe slots, M.2 slots and SATA ports to share PCIe lanes, and there are limits for how many PCIe lanes your CPU and chipset will support. For example, fully populating all of your M.2 slots might disable some SATA ports or reduce how many PCIe lanes your GPU can use. Your motherboard manual (which you can usually find online) will explain this. Read the manual!
How Do I Upgrade My Storage?
All of the large client storage vendors have free disk cloning software that lets you “clone” (make an exact copy) of an existing drive to a new drive (as long as the new drive is made by that storage vendor). You can also pay for commercial cloning software or find free cloning software to do the same thing, regardless of what drives you have.
This type of software lets you install the new drive, clone the old drive to the new drive and then remove the old drive from the system. Having this capability lets you avoid having to reinstall Windows and all of your applications on the new drive. Another choice would be to start fresh, perhaps using something like Chocolatey to automate the process.
Upgrading Your Drive Firmware
One thing you should do is to install the drive management software that your storage vendor uses, so you can check your drive firmware and upgrade it if necessary. For example, Samsung uses Samsung Magician for this.
The Windows NVMe driver is much better than it used to be, so most storage vendors just use it. One exception I am aware of is Solidigm, which uses their own NVMe driver.
Amazon Affiliate Links for Recommended SSDs
I have lots of good personal experience with Samsung, Crucial, Solidigm, and SK Hynix M.2 SSDs, so that is what I am going to recommend here. I am only going to recommend M.2 PCIe NVMe drives. In late 2023, I think 2.5″ SATA SSDs are a “negative good” (which is an old term from micro-economics).
These are all Amazon affiliate links, which means that I earn a small commission if you buy anything using my link. Doing that does not increase your cost.
Samsung
I have been a long-time Samsung user with very good luck over the years. Samsung makes all of their own components and has a the Samsung Magician software. Samsung is slightly more expensive than Solidigm or SK Hynix, but the difference is quite small now.
- 4TB Samsung 990 PRO (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 2TB Samsung 990 PRO (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 1TB Samsung 990 PRO (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 2TB Samsung 980 PRO (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 1TB Samsung 980 PRO (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus (PCIe 3.0, TLC)
- 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus (PCIe 3.0, TLC)
Crucial
The Crucial T700 is probably the best PCIe 5.0 SSD right now. There is still a significant price premium compared to PCIe 4.0 SSDs. You need to make sure that your CPU, motherboard, and the M.2 slot all support PCIe 5.0 in order to get full PCIe 5.0 bandwidth.
Solidigm
Solidigm is the NAND storage folks from Intel, so they have good software and a lot of storage experience. The QLC P41 Plus is extremely affordable, and performs quite well for a QLC drives, especially with the Solidigm software and NVMe driver.
- 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro (PCIe 4.0, TLC)
- 2TB Solidigm P41 Plus (PCIe 4.0, QLC)
- 1TB Solidigm P41 Plus (PCIe 4.0, QLC)
SK Hynix
SK Hynix makes good quality M.2 SSDs that are very similar to Solidigm, but cost a little less. I have bought quite a few of these over the past year.
Final Words
Now is a great time to take advantange of low NAND prices to upgrade your storage before prices start to go back up in 2024.
If you have any questions about this post, please ask me here in the comments or on Twitter. I am pretty active on Twitter as GlennAlanBerry. Thanks for reading!