The SSD market can seem overwhelming at first glance, but we'll tell you, it is a great time to upgrade your storage considering ever-lower prices and two distinct segments that go from fast and relatively affordable to extremely fast and more costly solutions, which we're looking at today: NVMe solid storage.
With dozens of hours testing storage devices under our belt in the last year alone, we have a pretty clear idea of what are the top devices you should buy right now, divided into six categories: Best performance SSD, best value SSD, best hard drives, best portable storage, best external storage device and best home/SMB NAS.
With dozens of hours testing storage devices under our belt in the last year alone, we have a pretty clear idea of what are the top devices you should buy right now, divided into five categories: Best performance SSD, best value SSD, best hard drives, best external storage device and best home/SMB NAS.
When it comes to storing data, there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution. With SSDs becoming much more affordable, consumers have a broad a mix of high-performance and high-capacity options to choose from, whether in the form of internal storage, external or network attached. Here are our top picks for best performance SSD, best budget SSD, best hard drive, best external hard drive, best home/SMB NAS, and best thumb drives.
The WD Black2 sports both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in a single package. Unlike other hybrid configs such as Seagate's Momentus XT which combine ample magnetic storage with a little NAND, the Black2 crams both technologies into one drive too, but it simply does what desktop users have been doing for years by making the flash portion a primary boot drive with the disk serving as bulk storage.
It's been a long year of HDD supply shortages and wacky premiums, but things are finally stabilizing and new designs are trickling out of drive makers. Recently WD expanded its flagship Black series with a 4TB model, meant to deliver a balance between speed, capacity and price.
At ~$350, a Black 4TB drive is slightly cheaper than a pair of WD Black 2TB drives and much more affordable than the previously released enterprise WD RE 4TB drive. Given that we've been spoiled by SSDs over the last few years, we don't expect to be blown away by the new drive's blistering speed, but it should be fun comparing its performance with other terabyte-plus hard drives if ample capacity is what you're after...