The question is, which hard drive should you buy? Does performance matter, or should you just go for the cheapest model? Here’s our verdict on five of the best hard disk models you can buy. How to buy the best hard disk for you Should I buy an HDD or an SSD? Controllers are a factor of SSD buying that only ultra-geeks will care about, but they're still important. The controller is a module on the SSD that essentially acts as the processor and traffic cop for the drive, translating the firmware instructions into features like error code correction (ECC) and SMART diagnostic tools, as well as modulating how well the SSD performs in general. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) is a huge data capacity and will allow you to store everything your family can throw at it. Hundreds of albums of family photos and home movies can sit comfortably alongside your ever-expanding film and music collection. Hours Upon Hour Of Video For performance, HDDs are also often gauged by rotations per minute (RPM), which is usually a direct indicator of performance. The RPM value impacts sequential transfers as well as random access latency. Lower RPM drives tend to be quieter and more efficient, while higher RPM drives have better performance. There are also variable RPM drives that try to achieve the best of both worlds. Power draw, heat, and noise are factors related to performance. The Seagate Skyhawk AI HDD is designed with “AI'' firmware to improve the drive’s ability to handle recording, video analysis, and GPU analytics workloads. This includes up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams with zero dropped frames. This is combined with a robust warranty, including a high workload rate and Seagate’s three-year data recovery service.

This 4TB drive is the largest model in the BarraCuda series, and while it’s not the most capacious you can get – the Western Digital Red family goes up to 12TB – it should provide more than enough storage for personal use. It’s not the fastest disk out there, either: it uses just two 2TB platters, combined with 256MB of cache, to deliver read and write speeds of around 165MB/sec. Before we jump into the list of the best drives we've tested recently, we should mention that although this is a roundup of the best internal SSDs, these days just about any such drive can be turned into an external USB unit with the help of an SSD enclosure. These are often little more than durable housings of plastic or metal, and you can buy enclosures for almost any type of SSD: SATA 2.5-inch, SATA M.2, or PCIe M.2. Just make sure that the enclosure supports the form factor and bus type of the drive you want to "externalize." Of course, you can also buy premade external SSDs; we've rounded up the best of them, as well. Serial ATA is both a bus type and a physical interface. SATA was the first interface that consumer SSDs used to connect to motherboards, like the hard drives that preceded them. It's still the primary cable-based interface you'll see for 2.5-inch solid-state drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) Solid-state drives (SSDs) have come a long way in recent years: a long way up in speed and capacity, and a long way down in price. mSATA, short for mini-SATA, is a predecessor to the M.2 form factor. It was primarily built into laptops, though some older desktop motherboards may have an mSATA slot aboard. With mSATA, the slots and drives use only the SATA bus, unlike M.2's SATA and PCIe support. For all intents and purposes, mSATA is a dead end, though you might run into it if you have an older laptop or desktop. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

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Software is another shopping consideration that only the storage nerds out there might dig into, but regardless of which company you go with, any SSD software management dashboard should have at least a secure erase option, a firmware update module, and some kind of migration tool that will let you safely and securely move data from one drive to another. Most mainstream drives will have you covered there. It is important to be aware of the drive’s form factor, with 3.5” being the most common for the best HDDs (this is the only type we cover). If you need 2.5”, your options are more limited, especially for capacity. Otherwise, your computer case’s ability to house a certain number of 3.5” drives might be your primary limitation. Then there's the difference between PCI Express generations. As you'd expect, drives speed up through each successive generation. PCIe 4.0 set peak-sequential speed records for consumer storage, and the first PCIe 5.0 drives have predictably blown these records away. PCIe 4.0 requires support from the specific desktop or laptop platform. PCIe 4.0 came to market with third- and fourth-generation Ryzen processors from AMD, and PCI Express 4.0 support is now available on the Intel side with Intel 500 Series chipset and later platforms with 11th to 14th Generation CPUs on the desktop. (It's also part of the company's mobile chip platforms from the 11th Generation onward. Indeed, the very latest desktop Intel platforms support the emerging PCIe 5.0 , whose system requirements are more onerous than PCIe 4.0.)

The PNY XLR8 gaming kit is more peculiar than other PS5 SSDs. Included is the PNY XLR8 SSD, which boasts a respectable 7,500 MB/s read speed and 5,650 MB/s write speed. But the real draw is the bespoke heatsink mounted to the underside of a plastic shield that replaces the PS5’s original SSD slot cover. Simply put, it is very fast – possibly even too fast for most people. Those high speeds are only going to come in handy when transferring large files to and from your console – like if you’re moving game data or huge video and screenshot collections between drives – and won’t make a hugely noticeable difference in-game.

SK Hynix Platinum P41

Capacity: 1TB | Sequential read speed: 7,300MB/s | Sequential write speed: 6,300MB/s | NAND type: 3D TLC | TBW: 600TB Pros: On average, an internal SSD can cost anything from 8 cents per gigabyte for a basic drive to 50-plus cents per gigabyte for drives made specifically for filmmakers or other niche use cases. A general rule is that smaller drives (anything under 240GB) will cost more per gigabyte, getting cheaper as you go up to the 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacity tiers. Sometimes, though, a 4TB or 8TB drive will demand a price premium per gigabyte over the smaller-capacity models in a line. (Credit: Kyle Cobian)

We've introduced you to M.2 drives and 2.5-inch drives above, but let's get into them in a bit more detail. 2.5-Inch SSDs: The Basic Drive Solid-state drives come in all shapes and sizes and are built for almost every purpose. Whether you need a drive whose first priority is dollar-savings, or one that will load up a 4K movie in less than half a second, there's an SSD made for the job. That said, while almost any SSD is much faster than any hard drive, not all SSDs are created equal—not by a long shot. SSD interfaces have evolved greatly over the last few years, and SSDs themselves are taking on different shapes and core technologies.Available in 2.5” and 3.5” drives giving you the ability to upgrade your PC, laptopand even your games console. The five-year warranty isn’t exactly anything special (almost all the SSDs on this list come with a similar guarantee), but it’s just the cherry on top of an SSD that essentially has everything the average PS5 player will need for a very competitive price. 2. Crucial P5 Plus The majority of NAS‘drives’ come with a minimum3 yearwarranty, with some of the Pro models such as the Seagate IronWolf Procomingwith a2 yeardata recovery plan ( Seagate Rescue Data Recovery).