Average SSD Price per TB

The average price per terabyte across all the SSDs we track, split by interface. NVMe carries a modest premium over SATA for the enormous speed gain, but that gap has narrowed as PCIe 4.0 drives have become mainstream — for many buyers a good NVMe drive now costs little more per TB than SATA.

SSDs come in three interfaces. NVMe drives talk directly to the CPU over PCIe and are by far the fastest — a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD reads at roughly 5,000–7,400 MB/s and PCIe 5.0 pushes past 12,000 MB/s. SATA SSDs use the older 2.5-inch drive interface and top out around 550 MB/s, but remain a cheap, universally-compatible upgrade over a hard drive. SAS SSDs are enterprise drives (12Gb/24Gb) built for servers and dual-port redundancy rather than desktops.

Form factor matters for fit: most consumer NVMe drives are M.2 2280 (22mm × 80mm), while compact laptops use shorter 2230/2242 sticks; SATA SSDs are 2.5-inch; and enterprise NVMe uses U.2/U.3 or EDSFF (E1.S/E3.S). PCIe generation sets the ceiling — PCIe 3.0 (~3,500 MB/s), PCIe 4.0 (~7,000 MB/s), and PCIe 5.0 (~12,000+ MB/s) — but a drive only hits its rated speed in a slot of the same generation.