Hard Drives & Solid State Drive
This section has been completely rewritten. SInce my last update, SSD's have been cut in half. With the exception of mass storage, many computers I work with lack HDDs all together. But for the realm of HDDs, just read the reviews, it seems that Hitachi has the better reliability at this moment with Seagate coming up last. Of course this will always be changing.
Solid State Drives are far more reliable, smaller, run cooler and MUCH MUCH faster than mechanical drives. We are seeing them even in laptops priced at $450+. For the business side, many companies utilize cloud storage, so a 240GB SSD makes productivity much faster for day to day activities. Right now larger drives run about $0.13-0.20/GB which is almost 10 times cheaper than my first SD (Vertex 3 64GB for $109.99)
There are 2 physical types of SSDs: M.2 and SATA. SATA SSD's are normally 2.5 inch drives (laptop sized drives) and come in 5mm/7mm thickness with a few being 9mm (older models, are not compatible with some laptops). M.2 Drives can either use the SATA interface or PCI-E interface depending on the model. Ones that use the PCI-E interface are labeled as NVME and while are much faster, do carry a premium at times.
Lastly, m.2 has 2 different "key" types and multiple length types and can be read more in-depth here.
I recommend M.2 when able to reduce the need for cables and NVME where the pricing makes sense. Below are links to 500GB SSD's broken up into sections and I will be linking the 500GB (480-525GB) variants. Avoid spending over $60 on a SATA SSD. As seen below, for under $100 you can get a NVME SSD that is 6+ times faster. While Samsung does make a great SSD, their SATA SSDs at the 500GB variant are as expensive as their NVME SSDs
Premium SSDs (NVME) 3000MBps+ Read Speeds ($70-$100)
Mid Ranged SSDs (NVME) 1500MBps+ Read Speeds ($60-$70)
SATA SSDs (>$60)
Solid State Drives are far more reliable, smaller, run cooler and MUCH MUCH faster than mechanical drives. We are seeing them even in laptops priced at $450+. For the business side, many companies utilize cloud storage, so a 240GB SSD makes productivity much faster for day to day activities. Right now larger drives run about $0.13-0.20/GB which is almost 10 times cheaper than my first SD (Vertex 3 64GB for $109.99)
There are 2 physical types of SSDs: M.2 and SATA. SATA SSD's are normally 2.5 inch drives (laptop sized drives) and come in 5mm/7mm thickness with a few being 9mm (older models, are not compatible with some laptops). M.2 Drives can either use the SATA interface or PCI-E interface depending on the model. Ones that use the PCI-E interface are labeled as NVME and while are much faster, do carry a premium at times.
Lastly, m.2 has 2 different "key" types and multiple length types and can be read more in-depth here.
I recommend M.2 when able to reduce the need for cables and NVME where the pricing makes sense. Below are links to 500GB SSD's broken up into sections and I will be linking the 500GB (480-525GB) variants. Avoid spending over $60 on a SATA SSD. As seen below, for under $100 you can get a NVME SSD that is 6+ times faster. While Samsung does make a great SSD, their SATA SSDs at the 500GB variant are as expensive as their NVME SSDs
Premium SSDs (NVME) 3000MBps+ Read Speeds ($70-$100)
Mid Ranged SSDs (NVME) 1500MBps+ Read Speeds ($60-$70)
SATA SSDs (>$60)