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What is an SSD? (Solid State Drive)

An SSD is flash-based storage with no moving parts — it makes your PC boot in seconds and load games and apps many times faster than an old hard drive (HDD).

SSD vs HDD vs NVMe

A traditional HDD uses spinning platters and tops out around 150 MB/s. A SATA SSD reaches ~550 MB/s. An NVMe SSD — which plugs directly into the motherboard’s M.2 slot — hits 3,000–7,000 MB/s. All our builds ship with SSDs, most with NVMe.

What size do you need?

512GB suits office use and a few games. 1TB is the comfortable choice for gamers — modern titles can exceed 100GB each. You can always add a second drive later; our upgrade service can clone your old drive so nothing is lost.

Related terms

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