Best HDD
With each year that passes, SSDs get faster and faster and HDDs get more and more storage capacity. So who does storage best?
Presented by MSI.
Winner: Western Digital Black
The Black series from Western Digital has long enjoyed a great reputation for internal hard drives. If you move a lot of large files this is a great choice.
Finalists
Seagate Barracuda drives are easy to recommend. They offer a good blend of performance, features and reliability, backed up with a very competitive price.
Seagate’s IronWolf Pro drives pack in the full set of Seagate’s reliability and performance technologies, as well as free data recovery for extremely reliable NAS use.
Hitachi Ultrastar drives are expensive, but they have very good reliability and an enterprise grade design. Backed by a five year warranty.
The WD Red NAS optimized drives should be on everyone’s shortlist when considering drives for use in a NAS environment.
Best SATA SSD
Winner: Intel 545S Series SSD
The Intel 545s series are among the fastest SSD’s available, even giving its sibling NVMe 600p series a run for its money. Yet another reliable Intel SSD.
Finalists
Offering blisteringly quick performance close to the maximum possible for a SATA drive, the MX500 is also very competitive on price.
The twin of the Western Digital Blue 3D is highly recommended too. Choosing which one to buy is only a matter of pricing.
The WD Blue SSDs are competitive mid-range products with good performance and value. Sometimes they pop up on sale making them a real steal.
Best NVME SSD
Winner: Samsung 960 Pro
Since its launch, very few consumer NVMe SSDs have come close to matching the performance of Samsung’s 960 Pro. A great SSD for gamers and professionals.
Finalists
The Optane 900P gives us a glimpse of what might be coming in the future. It’s expensive, but you’re getting the fastest SSD on the market.
If the price of the 960 Pro is off-putting, fear not. The 960 Evo is still a blazing fast drive but comes with a more palatable price.
The 600P can’t match the performance of higher priced NVMe drives, but it does offer better-than-SATA read performance and has no competition value wise.
Not everyone can afford terabytes of SSD space. With the right system configuration, this little Optane drive can make a real performance difference.
