2021 doesn’t seem like that long ago, but in the world of computer technology it might as well have been a century. If you bought your storage back then, the prevailing advice was to get something between 500GB and 1TB, and that SATA was still perfectly fine, with most apps and games seeing no real benefit from the faster (but much more expensive) NVMe drives.
If you’re in the market for new storage today, things have changed dramatically. Almost none of the old advice makes sense anymore, and unprecedented economic issues have made budget considerations extremely complicated.
The era of “cheaper SSDs forever” is over
It was fun while it lasted
If you’ve been into the PC game since the early days of the IBM PC like me, then the one thing you could always count on was a downward trend in price. Not always in absolute terms, but definitely in value terms. If you take the performance, capacity, and feature increases in PC hardware over the years, the reduction in cost is staggering. A $300 Chromebook is more powerful than any computer in the world from the 1980s, for example.
But in a very short amount of time, computer hardware has reversed that trend, and it has nothing to do with technology limitations. Transistors are still shrinking, new performance tricks are still arriving, it’s just that extremely high demand from the AI industry is pushing component prices through the roof and destroying supply.
It touches every product that uses RAM or flash memory, and, of course, CPU and GPU production capacity is also zero-sum. If you bought the most budget gaming console (the Xbox Series S) with 10GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD, the asking price was a reasonable $299. As of July 2026, that exact same console will now cost you $499!
Since no one knows if or when this upward pressure on component prices will end, it makes buying decisions incredibly hard. You have to really think about how much and how fast your storage actually has to be. Do you tough it out with what you have? What capacity makes sense for the medium to long term, considering the extreme price per-gigabyte?
SATA stopped being the default years ago
Hanging on by a thread
SATA III SSDs cap out at 600MB/s, which is not slow in absolute terms. That’s still a great speed for a USB drive, and all your older software is still going to run fine, but the only reason to buy SATA SSDs today is if you want a bigger drive and the speed isn’t that important.
A large SATA SSD is, for example, a great solution for your PC games from the PlayStation 4 era and earlier. These games don’t benefit much from NVMe capacity, and SATA SSDs are much cheaper per-gigabyte than NVMe. Or at least, that’s how it should be, but the demand-driven pricing madness does lead to some irrational seller behavior.
I’ve converted all my existing SATA SSDs to USB drives, and use them for last-generation console games or PC games. They’re nowhere near wearing out, and every megabyte that goes on these drives saves me space on my NVMe drives. However, most PCs these days have multiple M.2 NVMe slots, so you can buy an NVMe drive today that’s a decent balance of capacity and speed for that first slot, and then one day, when pricing looks better, you can add to it. If you’re still using a SATA SSD as your main system disk, you need to change that as soon as possible.
Capacity is the new luxury
Even New York apartments gouge you less for space
It’s not that SSDs are completely unaffordable, but that access to higher-capacity drives is becoming gate-kept by high pricing. A 1TB SSD really is the minimum useful size, with large OS install footprints, massive 100GB+ video game installs, large media file sizes.
However, as it stands, 1TB SSDs really are a rip-off in 2026. It seems the sweet spot is 2TB, and will probably give you better long-term value. 4TB and 8TB drives are only for people who don’t even look at the price of things.
- Storage capacity
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2TB
- Hardware Interface
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PCIE x 4
The WD_Black 2TB SSD is great for gaming. It offers read speeds of up to 7,300 mb/s and features an optional heatsink. The drive includes the wd_black dashboard software for monitoring health and customizing RGB lighting on compatible models.
Benchmarks aren’t the deciding factor anymore
The need for speed? More like the need to be sensible
While it’s finally possible to tell the difference in real-world performance between a SATA SSD and an NVMe drive, I doubt anyone will notice the difference between a 15GB/s PCIe 5.0 drive and a 7GB/s PCIe 4.0 drive. Heck, I still use 3.5GB/s NVMe drives in some computers, and it also makes little real-world difference, even in heavy video games.
The only reason I wouldn’t bother recommending someone buy a slower drive than PCIe 4.0 is that the price difference isn’t worth the lack of future-proofing. The truth is that any PCIe 4.0 drive from any half-decent brand is going to have more performance than a regular person needs today. If your use case actually needs PCIe 5.0 performance, we’re into the realm of professional workstations here, where the computer actually generates money. Buying advice in that scenario is completely different and out of scope here.
The new SSD buying playbook for 2026
Obviously, everyone has different needs and use cases, but if you’re buying a new SSD today, the best solution for most people, most of the time is going to be a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. If you have to wonder whether you need a PCIe 5.0 SSD, then you don’t need one.
As for your existing SSDs, if they are still functional, keep using them but shift them down to uses that don’t require much speed. It’s fine to keep those SATA SSDs in your desktop PC, as long as they don’t eat into your PCIe lane allocation for the GPU or NVMe SSDs. Alternatively, moving them to USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) enclosures is a great use case, and you won’t sacrifice performance since those ports are faster than standard internal SATA slots can handle anyway.
The same can’t be said for your old NVMe drives, which would generally be wasted on USB, so if you have spare M.2 slots for them, they can stay in your system, acting as second-tier fast storage.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
