It is generally understood that some of the newer PC hard disk drives are faster than the older SATA drives. In a given category, some brands are faster than others. Installing a SSD drive in a slow computer can often give the PC a few more years of useful life.

Here are some observations about hard drive performance:

  • Recent drives from Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung all have good performance. There are other brands that also have good performance.
  • In most PCs, the hard drive form factor is usually 2.5” for a non-PCI drive.
  • A SSD drive can be used to replace any SATA drive in a PC. PCI slots for NVMe drives are only found on recent PCs.
  • If slots are available, a SSD drive and a NVMe drive can be installed on a PC. The NVMe drive can be used for booting the PC and the SSD drive can be used for data storage.
  • The general trend is that newer PCs come with the NVMe M2 PCI drives.
  • Some 2.5” 7200 RPM SATA hard drives are not faster than a 5400 RPM equivalent.
  • A typical price for a 500 GB SSD drive is $50 to $60. A typical price for a 500 GB NVMe drive is $50 to $100.

Here are three very useful apps for benchmarking the performance of a hard drive:

Please see the attached screen snapshot for the Samsung NVMe drive installed in my office PC. I removed the factory drive from my Surface Pro and made a portable USB drive using one of these cases:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09T97Z7DM?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097H7JZVG?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details