The selection of a primary storage drive in important because it is where your operating system and applications will be housed - so you need to make sure there is enough space for what you need now as well as room to grow for the future. How quickly your operating system and programs load is also largely affected by the speed of this drive, so if you demand fast overall performance from your computer you don't want to skimp here.

Traditional hard drives operate by storing data on a spinning metal disk, called a platter. The more platters there are in a drive, and the more data that can be crammed onto each platter, is what determines the overall storage capacity of a given hard drive. Having more platters also tends to mean louder drives, though rotational speed affects that as well. Rotational speed also impacts the drive's performance: if it spins faster it can read or write more information per second.

Another storage option is solid-state drives, which don't have any moving parts. Instead they store data in a flash-like memory - similarly to how memory cards for cameras and other devices operate. This makes them completely silent, but they tend to cost a lot more for the same amount of storage when compared to normal hard drives. They can also perform faster or slower than hard drives, depending on the way they are manufactured; here at Puget Systems we've chosen to carry only the highest quality solid-state drives, so if you choose to invest in one you will get excellent performance.

WD Gold drives are oriented toward data center use - and so feature high speeds paired with increased reliability features. For performance they use the SATA 6Gbps interconnect, spin at 7200rpm, and have 128 MB cache. Reliability is ensured with dual actuator head positioning, RAFF for vibration protection, and TLER to help avoid drives dropping out of arrays (RAID). Even though they are aimed at data centers and other enterprise applications, the features these drives have make them excellent options for users who need high capacity, reliability, and performance.

Western Digital's Red line of hard drives are a combination of the lower power and low noise features of the Green series along with the 24/7 operation and longevity of the RE series. They are not the fastest drives, but are built for use in storage servers and other always-on systems that need large drive capacity - making them a perfect choice for NAS units, home servers, and RAID configurations.

We have an article where you can read about the differences between the Red and Green series in more depth here.

Puget Professional Advice:

Jeff Stubbers (Mr. Customer Service) Says: This is an excellent drive if you are looking for a cool and quiet operating drive along with higher capacity. This drive does run around 5400 RPM, where traditional drives run around 7200 RPM, so there will be a certain performance hit when accessing data on these drives. It's worth mentioning that these drives use 4KB sectors instead of 512B sectors, so if you intend to install Windows XP on your own with these drives, make sure to run the WD Align utility to allow you to properly install on this drive.

Ruben Romero (Production Technician) Says: I like the Red series drives from Western Digital. I use two of these 2TB drives in a RAID1 at home with a simple NAS box that sits on top of my desk and another in my day to day system for storage. The Red series drives are quieter under use since they only spin at 5400RPM and have respectable performance as well. I would recommend Red drives for someone who just needs large amounts of space to store their media or projects.

 Most Popular Part!

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 EVO series represents their middle tier of drives, but has been updated with Samsung's new 3D NAND memory technology for improved performance, efficiency, and longevity. These drives still use the standard SATA 6Gbps interface which provides for high speeds and input / output operations per second (IOPS).

It is worth noting that SSD performance increases with larger size drives. If you want the fastest performance, consider a larger capacity model.

Puget Professional Advice:

Wilson Chau (Customer Service Lead) Says: The EVO line is "slightly" slower than the PRO version and has half the manufacturer warranty time (5 years) than the Pro, but for most users, it's a great option at a lower price point.

WD Gold drives are oriented toward data center use - and so feature high speeds paired with increased reliability features. For performance they use the SATA 6Gbps interconnect, spin at 7200rpm, and have 128 MB cache. Reliability is ensured with dual actuator head positioning, RAFF for vibration protection, and TLER to help avoid drives dropping out of arrays (RAID). Even though they are aimed at data centers and other enterprise applications, the features these drives have make them excellent options for users who need high capacity, reliability, and performance.

Samsung's 960 EVO line of solid-state drives is part of their second generation of retail M.2 form factor SSDs. These drives run at a full PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speed, which provides lots bandwidth and results in performance that is several times what a SATA III based SSD can provide. This 250GB model has sequential read speeds of up to 3.2GB/s with write speeds up to 1.5GB/s.

The limitation of these EVO series drives, however, is that not all of the memory on the drive is capable of those speeds. A portion is, but the rest of the drive has slower write speeds. That can show up in situations where a lot of data is being written at once: after a time, once the faster part of the drive is used up, the write speeds will drop substantially. This situation is not likely to arise in typical desktop usage, but can show up in some workstation loads.

Please note that some M.2 slots on motherboards only run at PCI-E x2 speed, rather than the x4 this SSD is capable of. In such cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot.

 Most Popular Part!

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 Pro series improves upon the well respected 840 Pro with higher speeds and a doubled warranty length of 10 years (or 150TB of writes). It uses the industry standard SATA 6Gbps interface and supports 256-bit AES drive-level encryption. This specific 256GB capacity model reaches up to 550MB per second for reads and 520MB per second for writes, and in excess of 90k IOPS.

Perfect for notebooks, SSDs are ideal for energy-efficient mobile computing to extend battery life, increase access time, and provide a durable alternative to conventional hard disc drives with superior shock resistance. High capacities and low power consuming NAND flash technology provide the necessary performance and battery life boosts generated by the proliferation of mobile gaming and new ultra-thin laptops. With fast access and seek times combined with excellent reliability, SSDs are the answer for consumers demanding this latest storage technology.

Puget Professional Advice:

Jon Bach (President) Says: The performance on this drive is great, and 10 year warranty is downright amazing. We have a long history with Samsung SSD, and they are the most reliable and consistently best performing drives we've ever worked with.

Jeff Stubbers (Mr. Customer Service) Says: This is a very fast drive, has a lower failure rate than rotary drives, and comes with a 10-year parts warranty from Samsung. I tend to recommend a 500GB SSD for Windows OS though, and these smaller drives for either scratch drive or Secondary drive.

 Most Popular Part!

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 EVO series represents their middle tier of drives, but has been updated with Samsung's new 3D NAND memory technology for improved performance, efficiency, and longevity. These drives still use the standard SATA 6Gbps interface which provides for high speeds and input / output operations per second (IOPS).

It is worth noting that SSD performance increases with larger size drives. If you want the fastest performance, consider a larger capacity model.

Puget Professional Advice:

Wilson Chau (Customer Service Lead) Says: The EVO line is "slightly" slower than the PRO version and has half the manufacturer warranty time (5 years) than the Pro, but for most users, it's a great option at a lower price point.

 Most Popular Part!

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 Pro series improves upon the well respected 840 Pro with higher speeds and a doubled warranty length of 10 years (or 150TB of writes). It uses the industry standard SATA 6Gbps interface and supports 256-bit AES drive-level encryption. This specific 512GB capacity model reaches up to 550MB per second for reads and 520MB per second for writes, and in excess of 90k IOPS.

Perfect for notebooks, SSDs are ideal for energy-efficient mobile computing to extend battery life, increase access time, and provide a durable alternative to conventional hard disc drives with superior shock resistance. High capacities and low power consuming NAND flash technology provide the necessary performance and battery life boosts generated by the proliferation of mobile gaming and new ultra-thin laptops. With fast access and seek times combined with excellent reliability, SSDs are the answer for consumers demanding this latest storage technology.

Puget Professional Advice:

Jon Bach (President) Says: The performance on this drive is great, and 10 year warranty is downright amazing. We have a long history with Samsung SSD, and they are the most reliable and consistently best performing drives we've ever worked with.

Jeff Stubbers (Mr. Customer Service) Says: I recommend this drive as a great Primary drive to go with. This is a very fast drive, has a lower failure rate than rotary drives, and comes with a 10-year or 300 TBW (Total Bytes Written) parts warranty from Samsung.

Samsung's 960 EVO line of solid-state drives is part of their second generation of retail M.2 form factor SSDs. These drives run at a full PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speed, which provides lots bandwidth and results in performance that is several times what a SATA III based SSD can provide. This 500GB model has sequential read speeds of up to 3.2GB/s with write speeds up to 1.8GB/s.

The limitation of these EVO series drives, however, is that not all of the memory on the drive is capable of those speeds. A portion is, but the rest of the drive has slower write speeds. That can show up in situations where a lot of data is being written at once: after a time, once the faster part of the drive is used up, the write speeds will drop substantially. This situation is not likely to arise in typical desktop usage, but can show up in some workstation loads.

Please note that some M.2 slots on motherboards only run at PCI-E x2 speed, rather than the x4 this SSD is capable of. In such cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot.

Samsung's 960 Pro line of solid-state drives is their second generation of retail M.2 form factor SSDs. These drives run at a full PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speed, which provides lots bandwidth and results in performance that is several times what a SATA III based SSD can provide. This 512GB model has sequential read speeds of up to 3.5GB/s with write speeds up to 2.1GB/s.

Please note that some M.2 slots on motherboards only run at PCI-E x2 speed, rather than the x4 this SSD is capable of. In such cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot. These drives can also get hot during extended read / write operations - moving data in the hundreds of gigabytes range. That is an extreme scenario, and most users will never run into it, but if the drive does get too hot it will throttle down to prevent overheating. That will reduce performance by as much as 50% until it cools off, but even then performance is still well above what SATA-based SSDs offer.

Puget Professional Advice:

William George (Puget Labs) Says: These SSDs are absurdly fast, and between the speed and the improved (but not perfect) thermal situation I no longer have reservations about recommending them. However, I should note that the speed doesn't help in all situations. Once you reach the speed of normal, SATA-based SSDs the improvement from an even faster drive only comes into play if your workload is actually doing a lot of reading or writing *and* isn't bottle necking somewhere else.

Oscar Tirado (Customer Service) Says: Samsung has done it again... I'm slowly becoming Fanboy. It's hard not to, when Samsung releases is amazing. When comparing it to a 950 Pro, this drive outperforms it by a large margin. It takes twice as long to throttle, meaning it can write ~336GB of data--as opposed to ~72GB--before slightly dropping performance, & in most cases, this drive will never throttle. I don't see this SSD becoming the bottleneck in your system for a longgggggg time.

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 EVO series represents their middle tier of drives, but has been updated with Samsung's new 3D NAND memory technology for improved performance, efficiency, and longevity. These drives still use the standard SATA 6Gbps interface which provides for high speeds and input / output operations per second (IOPS).

It is worth noting that SSD performance increases with larger size drives. This 1TB model is somewhat faster than the smaller sizes, and more cost effective.

Puget Professional Advice:

Wilson Chau (Customer Service Lead) Says: The EVO line is "slightly" slower than the PRO version and has half the manufacturer warranty time (5 years) than the Pro, but for most users, it's a great option at a lower price point.

 Most Popular Part!

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 Pro series improves upon the well respected 840 Pro with higher speeds and a doubled warranty length of 10 years (or 150TB of writes). It uses the industry standard SATA 6Gbps interface and supports 256-bit AES drive-level encryption. This specific 1TB capacity model reaches up to 550MB per second for reads and 520MB per second for writes, and in excess of 90k IOPS.

Perfect for notebooks, SSDs are ideal for energy-efficient mobile computing to extend battery life, increase access time, and provide a durable alternative to conventional hard disc drives with superior shock resistance. High capacities and low power consuming NAND flash technology provide the necessary performance and battery life boosts generated by the proliferation of mobile gaming and new ultra-thin laptops. With fast access and seek times combined with excellent reliability, SSDs are the answer for consumers demanding this latest storage technology.

Samsung's 960 EVO line of solid-state drives is part of their second generation of retail M.2 form factor SSDs. These drives run at a full PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speed, which provides lots bandwidth and results in performance that is several times what a SATA III based SSD can provide. This 1TB model has sequential read speeds of up to 3.2GB/s with write speeds up to 1.9GB/s.

The limitation of these EVO series drives, however, is that not all of the memory on the drive is capable of those speeds. A portion is, but the rest of the drive has slower write speeds. That can show up in situations where a lot of data is being written at once: after a time, once the faster part of the drive is used up, the write speeds will drop substantially. This situation is not likely to arise in typical desktop usage, but can show up in some workstation loads.

Please note that some M.2 slots on motherboards only run at PCI-E x2 speed, rather than the x4 this SSD is capable of. In such cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot.

Samsung's 960 Pro line of solid-state drives is their second generation of retail M.2 form factor SSDs. These drives run at a full PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speed, which provides lots bandwidth and results in performance that is several times what a SATA III based SSD can provide. This 1TB model has sequential read speeds of up to 3.5GB/s with write speeds up to 2.1GB/s.

Please note that some M.2 slots on motherboards only run at PCI-E x2 speed, rather than the x4 this SSD is capable of. In such cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot. These drives can also get hot during extended read / write operations - moving data in the hundreds of gigabytes range. That is an extreme scenario, and most users will never run into it, but if the drive does get too hot it will throttle down to prevent overheating. That will reduce performance by as much as 50% until it cools off, but even then performance is still well above what SATA-based SSDs offer.

Puget Professional Advice:

William George (Puget Labs) Says: These SSDs are absurdly fast, and between the speed and the improved (but not perfect) thermal situation I no longer have reservations about recommending them. However, I should note that the speed doesn't help in all situations. Once you reach the speed of normal, SATA-based SSDs the improvement from an even faster drive only comes into play if your workload is actually doing a lot of reading or writing *and* isn't bottle necking somewhere else.

Josh Raye (Production Manager) Says: A worthy improvement over the previous generation. This M.2 drive does still throttle under extended stress, but it takes twice as long to hit that point, and the speed that it throttles to exceeds the last generation's non-throttled speed.

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 EVO series represents their middle tier of drives, but has been updated with Samsung's new 3D NAND memory technology for improved performance, efficiency, and longevity. These drives still use the standard SATA 6Gbps interface which provides for high speeds and input / output operations per second (IOPS).

It is worth noting that SSD performance increases with larger size drives. This 2TB model is only a little faster than the 1TB version, but can be a lot faster than some of the small models in certain real-world applications.

Puget Professional Advice:

Wilson Chau (Customer Service Lead) Says: The EVO line is "slightly" slower than the PRO version and has half the manufacturer warranty time (5 years) than the Pro, but for most users, it's a great option at a lower price point.

 Most Popular Part!

Samsung's line of solid-state drives are among the fastest SSDs on the market. The 850 Pro series improves upon the well respected 840 Pro with higher speeds and a doubled warranty length of 10 years (or 300TB of writes). It uses the industry standard SATA 6Gbps interface and supports 256-bit AES drive-level encryption. This specific 2TB capacity model reaches up to 550MB per second for reads and 520MB per second for writes, and in excess of 90k IOPS.

Perfect for notebooks, SSDs are ideal for energy-efficient mobile computing to extend battery life, increase access time, and provide a durable alternative to conventional hard disc drives with superior shock resistance. High capacities and low power consuming NAND flash technology provide the necessary performance and battery life boosts generated by the proliferation of mobile gaming and new ultra-thin laptops. With fast access and seek times combined with excellent reliability, SSDs are the answer for consumers demanding this latest storage technology.

Samsung's 960 Pro line of solid-state drives is their second generation of retail M.2 form factor SSDs. These drives run at a full PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speed, which provides lots bandwidth and results in performance that is several times what a SATA III based SSD can provide. This 2TB model has sequential read speeds of up to 3.5GB/s with write speeds up to 2.1GB/s.

Please note that some M.2 slots on motherboards only run at PCI-E x2 speed, rather than the x4 this SSD is capable of. In such cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot. These drives can also get hot during extended read / write operations - moving data in the hundreds of gigabytes range. That is an extreme scenario, and most users will never run into it, but if the drive does get too hot it will throttle down to prevent overheating. That will reduce performance by as much as 50% until it cools off, but even then performance is still well above what SATA-based SSDs offer.