I’ve long been a proponent of SSD drives and got my first one nine years ago. Since that time, the sizes have grown, the speed has increased and the prices have come down. Today I’ll look at one of the best options today. Yes, I’ll post links so you can get it at Amazon for which I earn a tiny commission. No, they haven’t sent me a free one.

There is a detailed photo of the drive above. If you are looking at the photo on a computer, the actual part is probably smaller than the photo. The exact dimensions are .87 x 3.15 x .09 inches. That’s pretty darned small! It requires and NVMe PCIe slot, which should be found on most recent motherboards and in most recent laptops. The form factor is considered M.2 2280.

Now let’s talk speed. If you use one of the best SSD drives connected via SATA III, you’ll get a max sequential read speed of around 560 MB/s. That’s pretty good. This drive gets up to 3,500 MB/s or nearly seven times as fast. Max sequential write time is 2,700 MB/s which smokes the 530 MB/s of a SATA III SSD drive. So if you want to get one of the fastest drives money can buy, this is a great place to start looking.

Yes, you’ll pay more than for a traditional hard drive. 1 TB mechanical drives are well under $100. You’ll also pay around a 25% premium over a similarly sized SATA III SSD drive. But that premium price gives you smoking fast disk access. It’s up to you to determine if the speed is worth it.