For todays holiday buyers guide were taking a look at SSDs. SSD prices have dropped a lot since last years recommendations, but our recommendations havent shifted much. High-end SATA SSDs have hit their limit for performance. The value segment of the market has seen a flood of drives using TLC flash, but none of them have brought prices down far enough to justify the power and performance penalties they pay relative to MLC drives. Samsung still holds the clear lead for the transitions to 3D NAND and PCIe interfaces.

The most significant development in the past year has been the release of many good drives using Silicon Motions SM2246EN controller paired with 1x nm MLC flash. These drives are preventing TLC from taking over the low-end segment: most SM2246EN drives offer performance thats within spitting distance of high-end SATA SSDs for typical consumer workloads, some of the best power efficiency weve measured, and prices to match or beat TLC drives.

The other big shift in the market is that the 120-128GB capacity class is fading away, with many new models starting at 240-256GB. When using 128Gb NAND chips, 128GB drives arent large enough to provide the full performance modern SSD controllers are capable of. 128GB drives also carry an increasingly steep premium in terms of price per GB, whereas 256GB and 512GB drives are priced very similarly at the moment. Unless youre quite sure that you wont need more than 120GB, the sensible buy will almost always be to move up to a 240+GB size.