The Best PCI Express NVMe Solid State Drives (SSDs) for 2024

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Most of today’s newest internal solid-state drives are M.2-format "gumstick" SSDs that run over the PCI Express (PCIe) bus and employ a standard called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) to maximize data transfer speeds. We've been covering these storage technologies since the get-go, and each year review dozens of SSDs, adhering to rigorous, repeatable performance tests for transfer speeds and program-launch times, and assessing each drive on design, warranty, cost per gigabyte, and more. Below, we've outlined our top tested PCIe NVMe drives for various users and usage cases. We include our favorite PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs in this roundup, but our best overall basic SSD pick for most users is the Crucial P3, a PCIe 3.0 drive. See that model and the rest below, bolstered by a handy spec comparison and a detailed guide to buying the right high-speed SSD for your desktop or laptop.

PCI Express NVMe Drives 101: How to Buy the Best

Until the last few years, the typical SSD was a little slab, designed to fit into the same space or drive bay inside a PC as a spinning hard drive. You can still find SSDs in this form factor, known as 2.5-inch drives, but times have changed.

Almost all new desktop motherboards and the logic boards of most current laptops incorporate slots meant for much smaller SSDs. These are known as M.2 slots, and they accept SSDs that look like sticks of silicon chewing gum. And depending on the drive, that slim little stick may deliver much faster storage than the bigger drives you're used to.

Why did SSDs take so long to get so small? Actually, from a strict manufacturing viewpoint, they never needed to be that big in the first place. Classic 2.5-inch SSDs have a lot of dead space inside, as memory chips are much smaller than rotating drive mechanisms, but they were designed to fit into existing bays to replace hard drives. In the move from bulky desktops to ultra-slim laptops and tablets, one thing came clear: That fatter kind of drive would have to go. An M.2 drive reduces an SSD to its essentials: just a strip of a circuit board studded with silicon, much leaner and easier to fit into tight spaces.

What Are M.2 Drives? Here's What You Need to Know

Most M.2 drives aren't exactly pretty; they look like bare circuit boards with silicon chips grafted onto them. Some may be topped by a heat spreader or heatsink (usually an array of metal fins) that is equal parts practical and decorative. The most important thing to know about M.2, though, is what it is and what it isn't.

Although M.2 is commonly referred to as an interface, that's not the whole story. M.2 is also a shape or physical form factor, and governs the keying that lets a drive fit onto a motherboard.

The data bus, or pathway, over which your data travels to and from an M.2 drive is a whole other matter, which is where PCI Express and NVMe come in. We'll get to the significance of NVMe in a moment; first, let's discuss the key physical traits of an M.2 drive that you need to understand. (The video below is a good primer.)

As we discuss in our parallel roundup, The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives, M.2 drives are differentiated by a four- or five-digit number listed in their names or specifications. The number is a measurement in millimeters, with the first two digits being the drive's width and the remaining two or three digits telling you how long it is.

In practice, all of today's PC builder- or upgrader-minded M.2 drives and slots are 22mm wide, so you can expect this number to start with 22. The most common lengths are 80mm (M.2 Type-2280) and 60mm (M.2 Type-2260). Drives as short as 30mm (M.2 Type-2230) or as long as 110mm (M.2 Type-22110) do exist, however. Why the differences in length? The longer the drive's PCB (printed circuit board), the more surface area it has to hold memory chips.

Length mostly matters when fitting an M.2 drive into a laptop. Most desktop motherboards with M.2 slots have mounting points for different drive lengths, whereas most laptops fit just one size. Check the space available before you shop.

An M.2 drive's length doesn't always correlate 1:1 with its capacity, but the bigger the stick, the more memory modules engineers can fit onto it. Due to space and density limits, most M.2 drive families top out at 2TB, though 4TB and even 8TB M.2 SSDs exist. You'll see five broad classes of capacity as you shop, with minor variations according to how much data the drive maker has put aside for overprovisioning (a safety margin for when the drive ages and cells start to fail). These capacity classes are:

• 120GB or 128GB

• 240GB, 250GB, or 256GB

• 480GB, 500GB, or 512GB

• 960GB or 1TB

• 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB drives

Now let's reiterate an important point: You may know an M.2 solid-state drive's length and capacity, but that doesn't tell you about the bus or interface it makes use of. That detail is vital to know—just as important as making sure the drive physically fits in the space you have.

SSD Bus Technology Basics: PCI Express and NVMe

The first M.2 drives were Serial ATA (SATA) drives, in essence a bare version of their 2.5-inch kin. You can still readily find SATA-bus SSDs in the M.2 form factor, and many M.2 slots will accept them. In some cases, both 2.5-inch and M.2 versions of the same drive are available, with little difference in performance between them. (See our reviews of Samsung's classic SSD 850 EVO 2.5-inch and SSD 850 EVO M.2 from some years back for an illustration.) That's because, with any SATA SSD, your data travels the same path, whether it's a relatively big 2.5-inch drive connected to your PC with a SATA cable or a stick in an M.2 slot.

SATA-based M.2 SSDs are all well and good, but mostly restricted to economy models these days—PCI Express is where the cutting-edge speed is. Your system specifically needs an M.2 slot that supports PCI Express to use these drives; some desktop motherboard slots support both kinds. A given laptop might support only M.2 SSDs that use the SATA bus, which limits what you can do in terms of upgrades. The only reason you'd upgrade in that situation would be to boost the available storage capacity.

Many of today's premium laptops can make use of PCI Express M.2 drives. (Important: Some, like the latest Apple MacBooks, have PCI Express drives soldered, in not-upgradable fashion, to the laptop's mainboard, so "PCI Express SSD" doesn't necessarily imply "removable M.2 SSD module.") As mentioned, almost all new desktop motherboards have M.2 slots, most of which support PCI Express drives.

The first generation of M.2 PCI Express SSDs made use of a PCI Express x2 interface with throughput higher than SATA 3.0, but not enormously so. That's changed. Today's mainstream M.2 drives support PCI Express 3.0 x4 (four lanes of bandwidth), working alongside a technology called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). The idea behind NVMe is to accelerate performance further, especially with hardy workloads.

NVMe is a control protocol that has come to dominate internal SSDs in recent years. You may have heard of the term AHCI in passing; that's the control scheme used by hard drives and SATA SSDs for data flow over the SATA bus. Though it works with SSDs, AHCI was invented back when hard drives were king. NVMe was designed from the ground up to govern solid-state memory, and is optimized for flash-based storage.

NVMe is the buzzword to look for when buying an M.2 SSD today, but know that your system and its motherboard specifically need to support PCI Express NVMe drives in the BIOS for the drive to act as a bootable device. Most current motherboards support PCI Express x4 NVMe M.2 drives, but you'll want to check on a board-by-board basis. (Some desktop boards have two or more M.2 connectors and support for a given spec can differ from slot to slot.) But outside of desktop motherboards from the last few years, NVMe-compatible M.2 slots are not a given (although you'll find them on almost all new boards). So consult your manuals closely before buying one of these drives.

Also, make sure that if your system supports and you're shopping for an NVMe drive, any PCI Express drive you're considering is specifically an NVMe model. Merely using the PCI Express bus is not necessarily a guarantee of that; PCIe M.2 SSDs existed before NVMe, and though all current models support NVMe, some oldies are still on the market. Today's mainstream solid-state drives are PCI Express 3.0 and 4.0 x4 NVMe M.2 devices, and they leave the fastest SATA-based drives in the dust.

Once again, remember that you need the right motherboard-level support to install one of these drives. For desktops, your motherboard specifications are the place to check. Many recent mobos support both M.2 SATA and M.2 PCI Express/NVMe. For a laptop, you may have to ping the manufacturer's support team to find what's inside (assuming you can even get inside).

Also, as we mentioned, realize that a few laptops solder their SSDs directly to the mainboard to save space, so a drive upgrade may not be possible. Note, too, that upgrading a laptop to a new SSD may violate the terms of any existing warranty.

PCI Express 4.0 vs. 3.0 SSDs: A Solid-State Speed Boost

Ready to shop? Not quite: Increasingly, mainstream drives now cite support for PCI Express 4.0 as opposed to 3.0. We've tested our share of M.2 SSDs that support the upgraded interface, and they are fast indeed. How much you'll be able to tell the difference, though, comes down to what you do with your PC.

Read speeds for some PCIe 4.0 SSDs are rated as high as 7,000MBps. PCI Express 4.0 drives are increasingly mainstream, but you'll need a relatively late-model desktop system to gain their full speed advantages. On the AMD side of things, you need a motherboard employing AMD's X570 or B550 chipset (for mainstream Ryzen CPUs), or a later 600-series chipset, or the AMD TRX40 chipset (for third-generation Ryzen Threadrippers). Intel introduced PCIe 4.0 support with its 11th Generation "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processors and its Intel Z590 chipset platform and brought it to the laptop market with its 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" mobile CPUs. Breaking it down to simple advice: Check your system or motherboard's specs for specific M.2 PCI Express 4.0 support, as there always exceptions, too. You'll likely only see it if your PC is less than a couple of years old.

You can use these PCIe 4.0-based SSDs in PCIe 3.0-only systems, but they'll just dial down to PCIe 3.0 speeds. So should you opt for one? If you'll be assembling or upgrading a late-model AMD or Intel PC with the right chipset, by all means. Hard-core gamers and content creators working on today's newer PCs will stand to gain the most. If you have a PCIe 4.0-capable slot for one, get one; otherwise, 3.0 will likely do you fine.

PCI Express 5.0: Leading-Edge SSD Speed

The current ultimate picks in internal storage are PCI Express 5.0 (aka Gen 5) NVMe SSDs, which support blistering throughput speeds (up to about twice as fast as PCIe 4.0 SSDs at peak throughput). Many of the major SSD manufacturers have rolled out—or at least announced—their first PCIe 5.0 models in 2023. But the hardware requirements are very specific, and recent: To run one of these at its intended peak speed, you'll need to buy a new Gen 5-compatible desktop PC, build a system from scratch, or update your rig's motherboard and CPU to a very late-model pair.

Specifically, Intel users will need a 12th Gen or later Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor or later, and an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset. Important: You'll also have to be sure the motherboard actually has a PCI Express 5.0 M.2 slot implemented. The chipset is not a guarantee of that, just an indication that the motherboard maker could include one. (Some of these boards will have only PCI Express 5.0 x16 expansion card slots, and not 5.0-compliant M.2 SSD slots. It's easy to misread that on a spec sheet, so be wary.)

With all that in place, Gen 5 SSDs, equipped with either their own heatsink or the one supplied with the motherboard, are capable of phenomenal throughput speeds, up to a theoretical maximum of 14,000MBps read and write. This does not necessarily translate into increased speeds at all tasks; the PCIe 5.0 SSDs we have reviewed have done particularly well at gaming and file-copying tasks. Yes, PCI Express 5.0 drives are wicked fast, but you will likely end up having to build or buy a whole PC to support one.

NVMe in Other Shapes: PCI Express Expansion Cards and U.2 Drives

If you're looking to add a PCI Express/NVMe drive to a desktop with an older motherboard that lacks M.2 slots, one option is an M.2 drive on a "carrier card." In essence, an M.2 drive gets fitted onto a PCI Express expansion card that drops into a desktop PCIe slot of at least four lanes.

We've seen solutions like this from Asus, Gigabyte, Kingston, and others. Also, a few motherboard makers bundle an empty M.2 carrier card in the box with their high-end mainboards. With one of these, an M.2 drive on a PCIe expansion card lets you tap the speed of PCI Express/NVMe without having a supporting M.2 slot. With older motherboards, the card may also add bootability, so check for that.

Some PCI Express M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained use, so having the M.2 module mounted on a vertical card can also mean better ventilation, and in theory less throttling due to heat. That said, these drives are so fast that under most normal use they finish data transfers before heat can become a major issue.

One other form that NVMe drives take, the U.2 drive, is confined at the moment to just a handful of SSDs. Its physical interface is much more common in servers than in consumer PCs. A few high-end motherboards may have onboard U.2 ports, but most will require a specialized U.2 adapter that plugs into an M.2 slot.

NVMe Drives: Shopping Tips

MEASURE TWICE, BUY ONCE: SIZE IS KEY. We've explained the secret code to decipher the length and width of an M.2 drive. Make sure the drive's length matches the available space, especially with laptop upgrades. Most aftermarket drives will be 60mm or 80mm long. Also check any heatsink or spreader atop the drive and make sure it won't interfere vertically with installation. (You can often remove a heatsink, but if it's there, it's usually for a good reason.) For the most part, an M.2 SSD wearing a thick heatsink is unsuitable for laptop use.

PAY ATTENTION TO THE BUS DETAILS. With laptops, an SSD upgrade is often a binary choice that hinges on the kind of drive supported—SATA or PCI Express, end of story. The usual scenario is that you're swapping out one M.2 drive for another of the same bus type and overall specs, but with a larger capacity. Most laptops don't have spare or empty M.2 slots, so your decision path is pretty straightforward.

Desktop motherboards are more complicated, in that some M.2 slots support both SATA and PCIe drives. In boards with two or more M.2 slots, this may vary between slots. Some support only SATA; others only PCI Express; and an older motherboard may support only PCI Express x2 instead of x4. In short, it's a swamp to be navigated with care. You need to know exactly what your board is optimized to use and buy accordingly. Check the motherboard's spec sheet.

CHECK FOR BOOTABILITY. If your desktop is getting a PCI Express/NVMe drive for the first time, verify with the motherboard or PC maker that the drive will be bootable. It's unlikely, but a BIOS upgrade may be required to get you there. (This is an issue with older motherboards, not current ones.)

PRICE IT OUT PROPERLY. Comparing SSDs in terms of value for money is tricky, but the best metric is price per gigabyte. PCIe drives tend to command a premium over SATA SSDs. Divide the price (in dollars) by the capacity (in gigabytes) to get the cost per gig; for instance, a 1TB drive that sells for $100 works out to about 10 cents per gigabyte. That's a ruler you can use to compare drives of different capacities.

Ready to Buy the Right PCI Express SSD for Your PC?

Not finding any SSDs in this list that look right for you? Check out the full feed of our latest SSD coverage. Also see our roundup of the best M.2 solid-state drives for more about M.2 drives in general. And if you're also considering a 2.5-inch SATA drive, check out our guide to the best internal SSDs overall, which evaluates M.2 and SATA drives together.

For more storage options, also refer to our roundups of the best budget SSDs, as well as the best external hard drives for PCs and for Macs.