The unsung hero of PC performance, these days it’s often storage that makes the difference between a fast, responsive PC and something that feels like less. A processor can only work as quickly as it can be fed data, and this is where a good solid state drive can help even a slow system become faster. Whether it’s an upgrade for an older system still packing a hard drive, or building out a new system from scratch, picking the right SSD is one of the more important decisions to make in configuring and customizing a computer. To help with this, we’ve assembled our SSD guide, outlining the best choices in SSDs of every form factor and price range.

Sizing up the SSD market here as we go into the holiday shopping season, what we find is that NAND flash memory prices have continued to drop in recent months. And this is a trend will persist into 2019. So as this year winds down we should see plenty of SSD sales, setting some new records for affordability along the way.