Storage explainers and market updates
Short, sourced answers to the questions that decide which drive to buy, plus where storage prices are heading.
Explainers
- CMR vs SMR: What It Means for Your NAS
Get a CMR drive for a NAS, RAID array, or anything with heavy or continuous writes; SMR drives are fine for write-once storage like backups and archives, but they slow drastically during rebuilds.
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- SSD vs HDD for a NAS: Why Hard Drives Still Win at Home
For most home NAS boxes on gigabit networking, hard drives are the right bulk storage: the network caps transfers around 116 to 118 MB/s, one NAS hard drive can outrun that, and SSDs cost far more per TB. Use SSDs as cache, or all-flash with 10GbE.
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- NAS vs External Hard Drive: Which Should You Buy?
Get an external hard drive for extra storage or backups for one computer; get a NAS when several devices need shared, always-on storage with redundancy — and use an external drive as a backup target either way.
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- PS5 SSD Upgrade: Which Drive to Buy and How to Install It
A PS5 storage upgrade means either an internal PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD, which plays PS5 games directly, or a USB drive, which stores PS5 games but plays only PS4 games — pick by what you play, then follow Sony's install steps.
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- External SSD vs External Hard Drive: Which One Do You Need?
An external SSD is faster, smaller, and tougher; an external hard drive is cheaper per TB and holds more. Use an SSD for working files, travel, and games, and a hard drive for bulk backups and archives — many people should own one of each.
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- NVMe vs SATA SSD: Which One Do You Actually Need?
NVMe drives are several times faster than SATA on paper, but in everyday use and older games the gap is small; the real reasons to choose NVMe are newer games built for fast storage and a PC with an NVMe-capable M.2 slot.
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- SSD vs HDD for Gaming: Load Times, FPS, and What to Buy
An SSD is close to required for modern PC gaming — several big games list one in their minimum specs — but it mostly cuts load times and pop-in rather than raising average frame rates. Play from an NVMe SSD; keep a hard drive for storage.
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Market updates
- Are SSD Prices Going Up? Why, and When They May Drop
Yes — SSD prices are still rising in 2026, driven by AI data-center demand and memory makers shifting capacity away from NAND, though the pace has slowed. TrendForce expects relief in the second half of 2027; Micron and SanDisk say tightness lasts beyond 2027.
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