Magnetic Hard Drive vs. SATA SSD vs. M.2 NVMe

Storage was once the final frontier of PC performance, and the last component to become fully solid state. Today, the latest M.2 SSDs powered by the new NVMe protocol and hooked up via zappy PCIe connections deliver performance that a conventional hard drive wouldn’t recognize. Yet the hard drive isn’t dead. Not when it offers so much capacity for so little money. Meanwhile, the trusty SATA SSD offers a combination of compatibility and speed that’s awfully compelling. Time to find out which storage technology is the best.

- Jeremy Laird

ROUND 1

Performance

You might think the choice between old school magnetic drives, conventional SATA SSDs, and the latest M.2 items was a total no-brainer. For the most part, you’d be right. Magnetic drives, with their quaintly spinning platters and delicately servo’ed read heads, certainly don’t stand a chance when it comes to raw performance. They’re OK at sequential workloads, albeit offering about one tenth the speed of a decent SSD at best, but they really suck when it comes to random access.

SATA SSDs, meanwhile, may be pretty quick, even by modern standards, but they’re ultimately held back by both the SATA interface itself, which caps peak performance at about 550MB/s, and the elderly AHCI control protocol, which was never intended to be used with solid-state tech.

So it’s M.2 and its zippy PCI Express interconnect that easily rules the day, with the latest drives topping 3GB/s for peak performance, and packing the highly optimized NVMe control protocol. The catch is system compatibility, and that’s why M.2 isn’t a complete no brainer. Especially for older PCs, a SATA SSD may be the most painless path to decent storage performance.

Winner: M.2 NVMe

ROUND 2

Capacity Spare a thought for the poor old conventional hard drive. In this brave new age of solid-state computing, the very notion of moving parts seems utterly antediluvian. But this is its chance to shine. When it comes to raw storage capacity, those spinning magnetic platters positively annihilate the solid state alternatives.