The unsung hero of PC performance, these days it’s often storage that makes the difference between a fast, responsive PC and something that feels like less. A processor can only work as quickly as it can be fed data, and this is where a good solid state drive can help even a slow system become faster. Whether it’s an upgrade for an older system still packing a hard drive, or building out a new system from scratch, picking the right SSD is one of the more important decisions to make in configuring and customizing a computer. To help with this, we’ve assembled our SSD guide, outlining the best choices in SSDs of every form factor and price range.
Last year saw massive SSD price drops across the entire market. Prices are still declining, but not as quickly as they were several months ago. Overall, the market has settled down quite a bit, but there are some important changes underway. The first products using 96-layer 3D NAND started shipping last year, but with NAND prices (and margins) so low, manufacturers aren't eager to burn capital ramping up 96L production. The transition away from 64L will take most of the year, but that's not a problem: so far, the 96L products offer only minimal improvements to performance or power efficiency. Not much is changing with SSD controllers at the moment, either, and even in the high-end NVMe market segment we're seeing many new products re-using familiar old controllers. We don't expect any significant changes in the controller landscape until the Phison E16 brings PCIe 4.0 support to consumer SSDs in the second half of 2019.
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