Storage covers a broad range of components, from the fast NVMe SSDs that most modern builds rely on to traditional hard drives and network-attached storage units. For everyday builds, the key decisions revolve around interface and form factor. Most current motherboards support M.2 2280 NVMe drives over PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0, with PCIe 4.0 drives offering sequential reads typically between 5,000 and 7,000 MB/s, which is more than sufficient for the vast majority of workloads. PCIe 5.0 drives push beyond 10,000 MB/s but run hotter and cost noticeably more. Capacity matters too, with 1TB being a sensible minimum for a primary drive given the size of modern games and applications.

We compare drives from well-established names like Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, Western Digital, and Seagate, alongside NAS-focused brands such as Synology and QNAP at the higher end of the price range.

If you are building a NAS or file server, pay close attention to whether a drive is rated for NAS workloads specifically, as consumer drives are not designed for the constant operation those systems demand.