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.

In the six months since the last edition of this guide, not much has changed in the retail SSD market. The constant price drops that kept the SSD market exciting through most of 2018 are over and prices have generally stabilized. Entry-level NVMe SSDs no longer carry a premium over SATA SSDs, and for most consumers a NVMe SSD should now be the default choice over SATA. Products using 64-layer 3D TLC still outnumber newer products using 9x-layer 3D TLC, and the newer drives are for the most part more expensive without offering much tangible improvement in performance, power efficiency or reliability.