How to Choose a High-Performance SSD for My Laptop

Replacing or adding a high-performance SSD is a very effective way to improve your laptop experience. After using an SSD, you'll never want to go back to an HDD. Here, I'll give the general laptop user a few tips on how to choose a high-performance SSD for my laptop.

1. Get to know common SSD interfaces on laptops.

I will skip the complicated interface definitions and text descriptions, and show you the following chart directly to let you understand M.2 SATA(1st&2nd), mSATA(3rd), SATA 2.5"(4th), and M.2 NVMe(5th) interfaces. But if you want, here are more details about the SSD interface and form factors. And this article will help you know How to Check if SSD is Compatible with Laptop or Desktop Motherboard.

2. Identify your laptop's SSD interface.

Way1: Checking the product introduction page of the official website is a quick way to get accurate information.

My laptop is Lenovo Thinkpad W541 so I look up on Product Specification Reference (a Lenovo official website) to find my product models. Then I find out its SSD interface specification on this PDF Page and it says that my laptop has an M.2 SATA and a SATA 2.5" interface.

Way2: Remove the small back case of your laptop directly to figure out your SSD interface.

1. SATA 2.5" is the easiest to identify and its interface is pictured below:

2. mSATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe are more difficult to identify because they are similar. However, you can quickly differentiate them based on these characteristics below.

-mSATA interface

An SSD with mSATA interface has two screw holes in the two corners, while one with M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe interface has only one hole. Therefore, there will be two corresponding holes on the motherboard with the mSATA interface, and one single corresponding hole on it with the M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe interface.

-M.2 SATA & M.2 NVMe interface

They are very alike. But if you look carefully, you'll find the M.2 SATA slot on the motherboard has a bump on the left, while the M.2 NVMe slot has it on the right.

Note: Some laptops require disassembly of the entire big back case to see the hard drive interface, in which case it is NOT recommended to do it yourself to replace the hard drive.

3. Purchase.

3.1 First determine the capacity.

Because the price of SSD is now very low, the larger the capacity you choose, the better. 500G and above is recommended.

3.2 Different brands of SSD have different prices for the same capacity.

Intel and Samsung are relatively more expensive, but I think their quality and performance are the best among the brands. If you have important data to store, it is recommended to choose these two brands, such as Samsung 860 EVO M.2 2280 SSD, Samsung 860 PRO SATA SSD, Samsung 960 PRO SSD (M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe) and Intel 660p 512GB NVMe SSD. If it's just for general use, Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, WD, etc. are also big brands with good quality and affordable prices, making them a cost-effective choice. Such as Kingston 480GB A400 SATA 3 2.5" Internal SSD, Crucial BX500 480GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD, and Crucial P2 500GB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD.

Note: The SSD lifespan is shorter than HDD. If the amount of data written is pretty large, the SSD is easy to be corrupted. So for data that is valuable, it’s recommended to back up frequently.

4. Install SSD on the laptop.

Video guide to install SSD on laptop.