Posts Tagged Under: SSD

A Comprehensive HDD Specification Guide

If you are looking to store your digital goodies with the most bang for the buck, then hard disk drives are undoubtedly the way to go. Whether it’s for a NAS, a secondary drive for some less-played games, or any other use where capacity is a priority over speed—there’s no beating the ‘price per gigabyte’ of HDDs. But how do you pick the perfect drive for your use case?

Although almost any modern drive should fit and work fine if there is a free compatible motherboard slot and power connection present (usually SATA, although older systems might have other connectors), there are a few different things to consider when looking to get the perfect drive. In this guide, I will be going over the what and the how of picking out your new drive (or drives!). But first, let’s take a closer look at what HDDs can offer us that an SSD or some other technology can’t, and what drawbacks there might be.

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Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X: Picking the Right Extra SSD Storage for You!

One of the key features in the marketing of the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X was the blistering fast storage drive contained in each of them. Welcome to the big leagues, console players! You’ll finally be able to understand why us PC gamers have been harping on about the excellence of SSDs for the past decade.

However, with great speeds come greater costs for additional storage, so we’re going to do a quick dive into picking the right storage for a PS5, Xbox Series X, or even Xbox Series S. We’ll even include one non-SSD choice, for the budget-conscious gamers.

Let’s get into some details!

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The November 2020 Memory and Storage Update

Prices for various PC parts often have a huge range, depending on items quality, performance, and availability. Some CPUs are $100, some are $1000, and some cannot be bought for love or money. Some other items have a much smaller range of prices, and this can be seen when we look at PC memory and storage (including RAM and hard drives). Memory and storage are offered by a large number of sellers, and thus the options are competitively priced. Most options that are similar in speed and capacity tend to be close to each other in price, making it easy to track and compare.

With time, long-term and short-term computer memory always sees a downward trend in price, with the only exception being when a factory is burned or flooded or something. Once certain items (or capacities) can be reliably found for a particular price, we overhaul our memory recommendations to recommend better/larger components, for the same price.

Along those lines, let us take a look at some recently changed recommendations:

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The June 2020 ‘Mostly CPU’ Update

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Welcome to our biggest round of updates for the main chart in several months!

There are some major CPU (and accompanying motherboard) updates that are coming to the guide, but in this changelog we’ll also list off some smaller changes that are on their way as well. All of these listed changes are either implemented or coming soon to all country versions of the chart.

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Understanding SSD Speed Specifications and their Relevance

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If you’ve ever taken a look at a solid state drive, you’ve probably seen a variety of performance figures. But what’s the meaning behind them? How important are they?

In How to Choose the Right Storage for Your Gaming PC, we covered the most common types of storage: Standard hard disk drives (HDDs) and common types of solid state drives (SSDs), reviewing how they best fit in a gaming PC. Today, we discuss where speed comes in.

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How to Choose the Right Storage for Your Gaming PC

M.2 SATA, M.2 NVME, SSD, HDD—if any of those abbreviations make your head spin faster than a hard drive platter, look no further. This article outlines the different storage options on the market today, highlighting the best use-cases for each and recommending the best product in every class.

Upgrading an older storage drive to an SSD is one of the surest (and cheapest) ways to give a boost to an older PC, but where should you begin? There are three main options on the market today: HDDs, SATA SSDs, and M.2 SSDs. Here’s a look at each.

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Five Great Deals on Gaming PC Components Right Now

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The market for PC components has been a wild ride in recent years. With the cryptocurrency craze driving component prices through the roof throughout most of 2017 and 2018, PC building took a hit and left enthusiasts seriously considering prebuilts (shudder).

But the crypto bubble has popped and other market influences are pushing prices down – for now. Prices for GPUs, the core components gobbled up by cryptocurrency miners, have generally come back down to MSRP, and after a supply shortage that drove up prices, RAM is finally sinking to around 2016 levels. Add to that a diverse market of storage options (HDD, SSD and the newer M.2 drives), as well as other supply improvements that are driving down prices, and you have significantly reduced costs for building a PC.

How long will it last? The latest generation of high-end Nvidia GPUs might be experiencing a string of card failures and low supply is nudging prices up. Meanwhile, US tariffs are pushing some manufacturers to raise prices. The time might be right to start building a PC—or begin looking for an upgrade.   

We’ve put together a list of some PC components that provide great value going into the holiday season:

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