Solid-state storages are universally faster than old-school hard disk drives, but not all Solid-state storages are the same. They come in different shapes and sizes, have different maximum speeds, and as you might guess, cost different prices.
We explain each type of storage in deep detail in “What type of Solid-state drives should you buy?” and also highlight specific recommendations in our round-up of the best Solid-state drives, but that information can be harder to apply when trying to buy a laptop or pre-built PC. Instead, it’s often more important to understand what kind of SSD you’re getting, so that you can decide if it suits your purposes.
To make that simple, we’ve created this quick breakdown for you. Key differences are outlined below, with a full chart at the end for easy side-by-side comparisons. It’s fast reading, so you should be able to get back to your purchasing lickety-split.
Interface type
An SSD can communicate with the rest of a PC using either NVMe or SATA. SATA is slower than NVMe.
M.2, on the other hand, is a type of form factor. You can find NVMe M.2 and SATA M.2 solid-state devices.
Sometimes product advertisements or summaries use “M.2 ssd” to imply an NVMe drive and “SATA disks” to indicate the presence of a 2.5-inch form factor solid state device. Because of this, don’t take such phrases at face value. Look instead at technical specs to determine the approximate speed of a laptop or desktop PC’s storage disk.
Speed
NVMe drives are faster than SATA disks. (This is true even if both SSD are in an M.2 form factor.) Transfer rates depend first on which generation of PCIe connector your NVMe drive uses, and then the individual model.
Currently, the maximum speed for an NVMe PCIe 3.0 (aka Gen 3) solid-state disk is up to 3,500MB per second, while an NVMe PCIe 4.0 (aka Gen 4) SSD can hit up to 7,500MB per second. Manufacturers usually list the theoretical speeds to expect from a particular model, which you can then verify by checking out independent benchmark results.
SATA SSD typically hit speeds of up to 500MB per second. (However, like NVME devices, performance can vary between individual models.) That may sound astonishingly slow, but compared to SATA HDDs, the difference is still like night and day—a 7,200 RPM hard disk tops out at around 160MB per second. Nearly everyone notices a material difference between an HDD and a SATA SSD during basic tasks like document editing or web browsing.
So why choose an NVMe drive over SATA? The advantage becomes tangibly clear when you’re loading or copying files, especially big ones.
Form factor
In typical laptops and pre-built desktop PCs, NVMe solid-state disks are usually found in the M.2 form factor. (Other forms exist but they’re far less common.) SATA solid-state devices can either take the form of 2.5-inch or M.2 drives.
If your laptop has a spare M.2 slot, first check if supports NVMe, SATA, or both before buying a drive.
Price
As you’d guess, the faster the drive, the more you pay. Current street prices for a 1TB SATA solid state disks are around $90 to $100, while a 1TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 disks hovers around $115 to $120 for recommended models. Expect to pay between $120 to $200 for a 1TB PCIe 4.0 disk, with less expensive models capping out around 5,000MB per second.
The form factor matters less these days, however. While 2.5-inch SATA SSDs can sometimes be cheaper than M.2 models, more often they’re the same price.
NVME, M.2, and SATA SSD comparison chart
