10 Best 1TB SSD Under $100

Getting one of the best SSDs for your system is crucial, because the easiest way to slow down a computer with one of the best processors is to plug it into a slow storage system. Your processor is capable of processing billions of cycles per second, but it often spends a lot of time waiting for the drive to bring it data. Hard drives are especially slow because they have platters that must spin and a read/write circuitry that must physically find its way to the data sectors you are looking for. For optimal performance, you need a good solid state drive (SSD).

You can learn more about the differences between hard drives and SSDs in our article. While SSDs are almost always faster, there are still cases (such as storing large amounts of data) where HDDs are definitely worth considering. You can get under $200 for a 10TB HDD, while you’ll pay over $400 for a 4TB SSD.

NVMe SSD prices are decreasing daily, so there is not a big cost difference between the best NVMe SSDs and their SATA-based counterparts. With the cheapest 1TB 2.5-inch SATA SSD being just $24 cheaper than an equivalent capacity NVMe PCIe drive (and four times slower), why bother with the old SATA technology when you can move into the future so cheaply?

Many of the best gaming SSDs still use PCIe 3.0, but more and more PCIe 4.0 drives are coming to market. Corsair was an early pioneer in this area, and the recently introduced 500GB Samsung 980 Pro SSD performed well in tests, but unfortunately its value proposition is not the best.

SATA has a theoretical performance limit of 600 MB/s and PCIe 3.0 4,000 MB/s, but newer PCIe 4.0 SSD drives can double this speed to 8,000 MB/s. The maximum speed currently available for Gen4 HDDs is around 7 000 MB/s, which is double the actual performance of the previous generation (3 500 MB/s).