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A 2.5" SATA SSD standing vertically in front of a stack of more SSDs Credit: Reviewed.com / TJ Donegan

The Best SSDs for Laptops of 2024

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A 2.5" SATA SSD standing vertically in front of a stack of more SSDs Credit: Reviewed.com / TJ Donegan

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Editor's Choice Product image of Samsung SSD 860 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB
Best Overall

Samsung SSD 860 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB

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The Samsung name means it may cost a little more, but you'll definitely be pleased with the performance of this SSD. Read More

Pros

  • Fantastic performance
  • Plenty of capacities offered
  • Five-year warranty

Cons

  • Slightly more expensive than other SSDs
2
Editor's Choice Product image of Western Digital Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD - 500GB
Best Value

Western Digital Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD - 500GB

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It's tough to beat the value of this SSD. It performs like a much higher priced model, and we appreciate the 5-year warranty. Read More

Pros

  • High read-write speeds
  • Five-year warranty
  • Affordable

Cons

  • None that we could find
3
Product image of SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD - 500GB

SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD - 500GB

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We feel this SSD is solidly middle of the pack, performance-wise. We are a little disappointed it offers a 3-year warranty when others offer five. Read More

Pros

  • Solid performance
  • Affordable
  • Warranty allows more frequent disk writing

Cons

  • Only a 3-year warranty
4
Product image of Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB

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For a long time now, this has been the gold standard. Now that the model is being phased out, prices are all over the place. Pounce on any sales. Read More

Pros

  • Excellent performance

Cons

  • Prices are all over the place
5
Product image of Crucial MX500 500GB SATA 2.5" Internal SSD

Crucial MX500 500GB SATA 2.5" Internal SSD

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Value can be found at the lower capacities of these SSDs. If you're looking for a terabyte or two, you should probably look elsewhere. Read More

Pros

  • Solid performance
  • Affordable at lower capacities

Cons

  • Higher capacities are expensive
  • Best Overall Samsung 860 EVO SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)
  • Best Value Western Digital WD Blue SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)
  • Other SSDs We Tested
  • How We Test Solid State Drives
  • More Articles You Might Enjoy

It's 2023: If any of your devices still have a spinning hard drive—be it a laptop, gaming console, or PC—it's high time you upgrade to a solid state drive. SSDs are cheaper than ever and easy to install, so there's no excuse. Even if your laptop comes with a 128GB SSD, upgrading to a bigger one can just make your life easier.

But while buying an SSD is a no-brainer, actually picking one means navigating a sea of confusing buzzwords. We've got you: We've tested the most popular solid state drives, and we believe the best overall SSD for most people is the Samsung 860 EVO (available at Amazon) . It's fast, it's competitively priced, it will work with just about every laptop on the market, and it has a 5-year warranty.

Unless you have a high-end laptop that supports faster "NVMe" memory (we'll address these in a later roundup), pretty much all SSDs are going to perform about the same. While the Samsung 860 EVO is still our favorite for most people, it pays to shop around—and if any of the other drives we tested is substantially cheaper, you can go with that without losing out on much.

A photo of the Samsung 860 EVO SSD
Credit: Reviewed.com / TJ Donegan

The Samsung 860 EVO is our favorite laptop SSD as it performs great, is cost-effective, and come in every form factor imaginable.

Best Overall
Samsung 860 EVO SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)

Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB

Formats: 2.5-inch, M.2, mSATA

Warranty: 5-year limited warranty

The Samsung 860 EVO launched early this year as the follow-up to the exceptionally popular Samsung 850 EVO. Though the 850 EVO is still trickling out of the market, the 860 EVO is the successor and includes a number of changes that result in better long-term endurance and some minor performance increases.

In our testing, the 860 EVO was a hair faster than the 850, even though both are limited by the SATA III interface's max speed. The 860 is actually the cheaper of the two now, as the 850 is leaving the market and prices tend to be higher.

Though not as cheap as the least expensive drives on the market, with the 860 EVO you can expect slightly better performance, a long 5-year warranty, capacities reaching 4TB (though M.2 versions top out at 2TB), and support for features like hardware encryption that not all drives support.

Across the board, the Samsung 860 EVO is the best laptop SSD that we tested. At typical capacities, it's only a tad more expensive than the other drives, and there's something to be said for the fact that it comes in nearly every form factor and capacity. Unless your laptop takes super-fast NVMe SSDs, the Samsung 860 EVO is the best bet on the market.

Pros

  • Fantastic performance

  • Plenty of capacities offered

  • Five-year warranty

Cons

  • Slightly more expensive than other SSDs

Buy now at Amazon

$74.99 from Walmart
Best Value
Western Digital WD Blue SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)

Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB

Formats: 2.5-inch, M.2

Warranty: 5-year limited warranty

The WD Blue series of SSDs has been a highly rated, well-priced addition to the market since the middle of last year. In our testing, the 1TB model managed consistently high read/write speeds, it's competitively priced, and it has a 5-year warranty.

While the Samsung 860 EVO did slightly better in a few tests and is rated to endure more use over time, for most people, the WD Blue is a cheaper option that will perform functionally identically in day-to-day use. It lacks hardware encryption and doesn't come in a 4TB package, but those are extremely niche concerns.

Overall, there is very, very little performance-wise to choose between the WD Digital Blue and the rest of the drives we tested, so it's better to focus on value. The WD Blue does the best job of balancing performance, price, and a long warranty, so for most people, it's actually the best choice right now.

Pros

  • High read-write speeds

  • Five-year warranty

  • Affordable

Cons

  • None that we could find

Buy now at Amazon

$77.40 from Walmart

Other SSDs We Tested

Product image of SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD - 500GB
SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)

Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB

Formats: 2.5-inch

Warranty: 3-year warranty

The SanDisk Ultra 3D NAND SSD comes in a wide variety of form factors and capacities, and it's very, very similar to the Western Digital WD Blue. That's not surprising, given SanDisk acquired Western Digital a few years ago and all these drives are limited by the SATA III interface.

In our performance tests, the Ultra 3D SSD managed to slide right in among the middle of the pack, only narrowly behind our fastest SSD, the Samsung 860 EVO, and slightly ahead of our value pick. As with the others drives, it’ll be a very fast upgrade over a hard drive but you won’t notice a huge jump over other SATA III SSDs.

Our only hangup with the SanDisk Ultra is its 3-year warranty, which is a bit behind the 5-year warranty that most of the competition offers. SanDisk does allow you to write to the drive significantly more frequently per day while still honoring the warranty, though, so certain applications that use the drive constantly (such as a security system), may find it to be better suited to their needs.

Pros

  • Solid performance

  • Affordable

  • Warranty allows more frequent disk writing

Cons

  • Only a 3-year warranty

Buy now at Amazon

$78.21 from Walmart
Product image of Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB
Samsung 850 EVO SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)

Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB

Formats: 2.5-inch, M.2, mSATA

Warranty: 5-year limited warranty

The venerable Samsung 850 EVO has been considered the SSD to get for years now. But at this point, it is just about off the market and the prices are fluctuating wildly. That said, if you can find it on deep discount for less than other current models, it’s worth picking up.

For most people, we’d recommend getting the newer 860 EVO, especially as it’s faster and typically cheaper since the 850’s stocks are basically all but spent. But if you come across one at a clearance price, just know that you’re getting a drive that can still easily compete with the best on the market—especially if you're using the slower SATA III standard anyway.

Pros

  • Excellent performance

Cons

  • Prices are all over the place

Buy now at Amazon
Product image of Crucial MX500 500GB SATA 2.5" Internal SSD
Crucial MX500 SSD (2.5-inch 500GB)

Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB

Formats: 2.5-inch, M.2, mSATA

Warranty: 5-year limited warranty

If one thing is clear from our testing, it's that most modern SSDs perform about the same when using the most common SATA III and M.2 connections. Outside of some newer high-performance NVMe drives that we'll test later this year, most people simply should find the cheapest drive that works for them and go with that—especially if that drive offers a 5-year warranty.

The Crucial MX500 definitely checks those boxes, and at 250 and 500GB it was as cheap as any other drive we tested. The one thing that held it back from our top value pick? The higher capacities were consistently more expensive.

Still, if you want a great, affordable SSD at 250GB or 500GB, the Crucial MX500 is as good a pick as any. It did perform ever so slightly worse than the best drives, but not enough you'd notice with regular use.

Pros

  • Solid performance

  • Affordable at lower capacities

Cons

  • Higher capacities are expensive

$48.99 from Amazon

$54.99 from Best Buy

$52.95 from Walmart
Product image of Kingston 480GB A400 SATA3 2.5 SSD
Kingston A400 SSD (2.5-inch 480GB)

Capacity: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, 960GB

Formats: 2.5-inch

Warranty: 3-year limited warranty

The Kingston A400 SSD performed admirably in our round of testing, but it didn’t do enough to make up for the fact that it offered lower capacity and typically cost more than comparable drives in this round. Though the capacity differences weren’t massive, an extra 20 to 40GB does make a difference.

The Kingston A400 was the only drive we tested to come in a sub-240GB size, which is great if you have a limited need for storage capacity and want a great all-around SSD. We don’t recommend drives that small for PCs or game consoles, but it’s a good option to have.

The higher price, average performance, and shorter 3-year warranty period were enough to keep the Kingston A400 from threatening the top spot, but if you find it on a killer sale and it fits your needs there’s certainly no reason to avoid it.

Pros

  • Offers smaller-capacity SSDs

  • Solid performance

Cons

  • Slightly more expensive than other SSDs

  • Only a 3-year warranty

$36.99 from Amazon

$40.00 from Walmart

How We Test Solid State Drives

A photo of a stack of 2.5-inch SSDs
Credit: Reviewed.com / TJ Donegan

If your laptop takes standard 2.5-inch SSDs, anything in that form factor should fit great, but performance will be limited.

For testing, we rely on the free and readily available Crystal Disk Mark, meaning you should be able to easily check our results. We picked our test batch by looking at market data, user reviews, current prices, and looking at other in-depth guides to the best SSDs at places such as Anandtech. We also reached out to each manufacturer to discuss their current product lines to see which drives may be replaced soon.

Though we're targeting laptop performance, for ease of use, each drive was tested using a Lenovo gaming desktop connected as a secondary drive via SATA III. For each test run, we used Crystal Disk Mark’s full suite of benchmarks (set to repeat 9 times). We repeated the test run with each drive at least twice and checked our results against other outlets to ensure they were within the expected norms.

Meet the testers

TJ Donegan

TJ Donegan

Former Director, Content Development

@TJDonegan

TJ is the former Director of Content Development at Reviewed. He is a Massachusetts native and has covered electronics, cameras, TVs, smartphones, parenting, and more for Reviewed. He is from the self-styled "Cranberry Capitol of the World," which is, in fact, a real thing.

See all of TJ Donegan's reviews
Kyle Hamilton

Kyle Hamilton

Product Tester

Kyle Hamilton is a product tester at Reviewed, specializing in home appliances and technology.

See all of Kyle Hamilton's reviews

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