Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe 3.0, 3D NAND, NVMe, M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT4000P3PSSD8

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In our testing, we found that the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX certainly lived up to its ambitions, scoring 7,364 MB/s reads and 6,870 MB/s. There are few models that can say the same, especially at the price point that the company's flagship drive retails for. You want a smaller capacity PS5 SSD: While the Nextorage NEM-PA is available in other capacities and performs well, the price point is less aggressive at 1TB and 2TB than at 4TB. The first attempt was a new form factor called mini-SATA, or mSATA. The boiled-down essence of an SSD with the shell removed, an mSATA drive is a bare, rectangular circuit board. (Most mSATA drives relevant to upgraders measure about 1 by 2 inches.) mSATA drives fit into a special slot in a laptop's logic board or on a PC motherboard. As the name suggests, the slot is a conduit to the Serial ATA bus in the system. The interface on the drive end is an edge connector on the PCB, as opposed to the usual SATA cabling. The mSATA drive also draws all the power it needs through the slot. All the SSDs in our roundup meet or exceed the recommended requirements set by Sony and are natively PS5-compatible. Keep in mind that regardless of which drive you choose, you will need a PS5 SSD heatsink. This is because the console has no way to dissipate heat with the M.2 port and metal cover as a computer's motherboard would. Without a heatsink, the thermals could become dangerously hot, and not only damage the SSD, but also your console. FAQs

The key thing to remember about M.2 is that it is a form factor, a shape. The bus—the data pathway over which the data travels to and from an M.2 drive—is distinct from M.2 itself and can vary. And it can make all the difference. The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow in the Editors' Choice-winning SSD 980 Pro, but for the most part it makes a great product even better. This power-efficient drive gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. The heatsink-equipped version of this drive performed slightly better than the non-heatsink version (which we tested using our testbed's motherboard's heatsink) in most of our benchmarks. It doesn't quite merit the 980 Pro's Editors' Choice award, because other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For You’re thinking of going for lower capacity: You can really only get the most out of the Seagate FireCuda 530 with 1TB and up, so if you’re gunning for a 500GB SSD, you can get a cheaper one that does the same job. The downside is its durability. The 970 EVO Plus has the lowest durability as measured by MTBF, rating only 1,500,000 hours, and its TBW rating at 2TB is 1200, matching the SN750, but lagging the XPG SX8200. At 256GB, it scores a rather low 150, the lowest of the three PCIe 3.0 contenders.However, the 990 Pro comes with its caveats. Its current limited capacity options might deter some, though we anticipate more choices soon. Additionally, while its price matches high-performance PS5 SSDs, it sits higher than budget-friendly SSDs like the Adata XPG SX8200. Those strictly budget-focused might consider the more affordable Samsung 980 or 970 Evo. Its random read/write operations aren’t the best among PCIe 4.0 SSDS, so this SSD is best suited for loading very large files like video games, large media files, or as a boot drive. The only SSDs that will work in the PS5 are Gen 4.0 NVMe models with heatsinks. Gen 3.0 models are too slow to reach the minimum recommend read speeds of 5,500 MB/s. Fortunately, the prices are continuing to fall on some of the biggest names in the storage world making 2023 the best time to consider investing. Do I need a heatsink for my SSD on PS5?

While PCIe 4.0 SSDs have a theoretical maximum speed of 8,000MB/s, the PNY XLR8 CS3140 pushes right up to that line with a rated sequential read speed of 7,500MB/s, along with a 6,850MB/s sequential write rating for its 2TB and 4TB capacities (5,650MB/s for 1TB). In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. You want a drive from a more established name: Corsair isn't as well-known when it comes to making NVMe SSDs as the likes of Samsung, Western Digital, and others here.Smaller-capacity 32GB and 64GB M.2 SSDs are also available for use in embedded applications or for SSD caching, but these are of marginal interest to upgraders or PC builders. Pricing on these drives ranges anywhere from 10 to 75 cents per gigabyte, and the biggest factor affecting price is the bus type of the drive. Know which bus you're on.In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in. The SK Hynix Platinum P41 is a worthy choice for anyone looking to buy a high-performance PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSD without breaking the bank. It blew away several of our benchmark records. The P41 provides AES hardware-based encryption and a clone utility tool as well as SSD management software. Just be forewarned that with its blistering speed, you will want to add a heatsink, the one item of note that it is missing. Finally, we use the drive as our primary SSD in our workstation PC (and video game console, if appropriate) to assess the real world use of the drive. Our tests reflect this for the most part, recording a sequential read speed of 7,256MB/s in CrystalDiskMark 8, with a somewhat lower than expected sequential write speed of 6,082MB/s in the same test. Interestingly though, it had the highest random write performance of any drive we tested (4,938MB/s), including the vaunted Samsung Pro 990, which had a roughly 17% slower random write rate (4,105MB/s). It also had the best average data copy rate of all the drives we tested recently with 1,733MB/s, so this is not only a great gaming SSD, it’s a fantastic all around performer at a great price.