The best SSDs you can buy

My choice for the best SSD is the Crucial MX500. It's available in capacities ranging from as little as 500GB to an impressive 4TB. And each capacity is offered at a more budget-friendly price than competitors with similar storage. It offers read and write speeds of 560 and 510MB/s, respectively, which is great for typical office work, home use, and students. Though gamers may want to pick up a different drive for more intense titles. 

*MSRP at time of writing. Please note actual retail price may vary depending on seller as well as available promotions and sales.

It all depends on what you want the solid state drive to do. If you want to upgrade your boot drive, you'll want to invest in a reliable SSD with decent read and write speeds as well as a reasonable price tag. For gamers, you'll want something with a large storage capacity as well as faster read and write speeds to handle large game downloads and launching apps and programs. For home use, a budget-friendly, low-capacity SSD is perfectly fine for handling documents, photos, web browsing, and more.

While researching each SSD on this list, I kept these criteria in mind: 

• Price: While solid-state drives are still more expensive than their HDD counterparts, it's still easy to find budget-friendly models. I've done my best to include SSDs at varying price points to suit different budgets. 
• Storage capacity: It's easier than ever to find an SSD with a higher storage capacity. Gone are the days where you needed multiple drives to cover all of your storage needs. Every SSD on this list was chosen for its variety of storage capacities, often ranging from 250GB to 2TB. 
• Read and write speed: The best advantage an SSD has is its speed. A solid-state drive uses flash memory to store and retrieve data, which allows it to be much faster than a traditional hard-disk drive with its mechanical parts and physical media. Each SSD on this list has been ensured to have a base read and write speed of at least 500 MB/s. 
• Durability: Whether you're looking for a portable SSD or an internal upgrade for your computer, you want it to last. Portable SSDs featured on this list have been ensured to conform to IPX water, dust, and shock resistance while internal SSDs have been vetted for their lifetime data load to ensure durability and years of use. 

Since a solid state drive doesn't have any moving parts, they can last quite a bit longer than a traditional HDD. A well-built SSD will last at least five years with moderate use, and high-quality SSDs can give you up to 10 years of use. You'll want to re-assess your storage needs every few years or so as well as regularly run diagnostics on your storage and boot drives to keep an eye on things as well as catch any issues before they have the chance to wipe or corrupt your data.

PYou don't have to buy a high-capacity SSD to get the best value. If you're wanting an SSD as your boot drive (where your operating system is stored), something around 250 to 500GB will be plenty of space. However, if you're wanting an SSD as a secondary storage drive or even your main, you'll want to err on the side of caution and get at least a 1TB capacity. This way, you know you'll have plenty of space for photos, videos, apps, game files, and documents. If you're an avid gamer, you'll want at least 1TB of storage on your SSD to make sure there's enough space for large download files and update patch information, but 2TB is what I recommend as game files only get larger with each new title that's released.

If you're building your first PC or planning upgrades to your current build, deciding which kind of hard drive to use can be tricky. If you want to prioritize speed, whether it's boot times or accessing files and loading programs, a solid state drive is the way to go. Solid state drives can get incredibly fast read/write speeds because they use flash memory, similar to what is used in USB drives and your RAM, to store and access files and programs. This means that there are no moving parts to wait for or that risk damaging your data. 

A traditional hard disk drive operates similarly to a vinyl record turntable: you have the disc, an aperture arm, and a needle. The needle "reads" the information on the discs to access files and programs or boot your computer. And while HDDs are significantly less expensive than their solid state counterparts, they also come with a high risk of mechanical failure as well as slower read and write speeds. But if you want to prioritize cost and storage capacity, an HDD is the better choice since they're less expensive and come in capacities up to 20TB.

It's all about what's inside your hard drive. A solid-state drive uses flash memory to store documents, programs, and files. This means that it uses a chipset similar to a RAM stick to store and retrieve photos, video, and more. It also means that loading, launching, and retrieval is much faster than a traditional HDD. 

A traditional hard drive uses a series of platters and a reading arm, similar to how a vinyl turntable works. The arm "reads" the platter, looking for the file or program you want to access, which is much slower than the flash memory of SSDs. It also means that you'll be at risk of losing your data to mechanical failure. Hard-disk drives are a much older, more established technology, so they're a lot cheaper to produce than SSDs. But as solid-state drives become more popular and cheaper to produce, consumers will see prices steadily fall as the years go by.

As the technology becomes cheaper to produce, prices of even high-capacity solid state drives have come down considerably since SSDs were first introduced. This means that you can find tons of great, affordable options for reliable storage in your laptop or PC. Here's a short list of alternative choices that I thought were great: