Want to build or upgrade a PC and you're looking for the best SSD? Read on.
Hard disk drives (HDDs) are old-school, so if you want the best performance possible you need to be looking at a solid state drive (SSD). But given that there are plethora of manufacturers out there all claiming to offer the best, it can be hard to find the best drive.
One way to find which is the best SSD is to wade through reams of online documentation from the manufacturers, and compile a list, and then pick what comes out top. Problem is, lab benchmarking is very different from real-world benchmarking, and they can give a better indication of how the hardware will perform.
How it's not possible for someone who wants to buy an SSD to go out and benchmark dozens of drives, but fortunately that heavy lifting has been done by UserBenchmark. The site offers a freeware PC speed test tool and has collected data on over 600,000 different SSDs (the site also has information on PCs, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, HDDs, and external drives), and has compiled this data into easy-to-use charts.
The site allows you to sort out the SSDs by a number of categories, including read/write speeds, effective speed, and market share.
I'm interested in effective speed, which is a measure of how well an SSD performs when subjected to typical consumer workloads.
So which drives come out on top? Here's the current top 10 lineup:
Read more: Find the best SSD for your PC | ZDNet