A solid state drive is often the most important component for making a PC feel fast and responsive; any PC still using a mechanical hard drive as its primary storage is long overdue for an upgrade. The SSD market is broader than ever, with a wide range prices, performance and form factors.

SSD prices have started to creep up a bit in some corners of the market, but the upcoming holiday sales should reverse that and bring new price per GB records. The industry is still slowly migrating from 64-layer to 96-layer 3D NAND, but that doesnt have much impact on end-user price, performance or endurance. At the very high end, PCIe 4.0 SSDs have arrived but are still far more expensive than PCIe 3.0-based high-end drives, without offering much in the way of real-world performance improvements. The sweet spot for pricing is usually with 1TB models, but anything from 480GB up to 2TB can come close on a $/GB basis. There are now several 4TB consumer SSDs to choose from, but theyre all more than twice the price of their 2TB counterparts.