4 reasons why you should upgrade your PC with the high-capacity SSD.

Although consumer NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs started as a premium, low-capacity storage solution for your OS and essential applications, the benefits of faster storage for a variety of workloads have spurred both the adoption and demands for higher capacity, high-speed storage options. For consumers who have lived the switch from an HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to an SSD (Solid State Drive), the idea of an 8TB NVMe SSD in an M.2 form factor is bound to be mind-boggling.

Now, things are different, and you can find relatively inexpensive SSDs on shelves almost all around the globe. But are there any benefits of opting for higher-capacity SSDs when building a new PC or upgrading one?

Yes. Let’s go over some of them!

Benefits of Higher Capacity SSDs
Besides the obvious benefits of ‘more space’ for your data, high-capacity NVMe SSDs can offer several other key advantages (a longer lifespan, for example).

Improved Efficiency and Performance
A higher-capacity NVMe SSD allows you to store everything you use without being forced to pick. In addition to allowing fast access to all your data, it enables seamless multitasking between different tasks.

Your applications load faster, your PC boots more quickly, your system is far more fluid and responsive, and tasks like file transfers are completed in a flash (no pun intended).

What’s more, a larger SSD even helps with your SSD speeds. The closer to full capacity an SSD gets past a certain point, the slower it becomes (some modern SSDs include a feature called overprovisioning, which mitigates this issue). So, a higher-capacity drive allows you to leave ample free space for peak performance.

Longer Lifespans



Larger SSDs last longer than their identical, but lower-capacity counterparts. It sounds bizarre, but there’s an explanation for this behavior. The life of flash memory like NVMe SSDs is based on how many times data was written to it, i.e., every block (or cell) can only be erased a certain number of times before it dies.

SSD manufacturers include features like wear leveling and trim support that serve to extend the life of modern SSDs. While the former tries to erase and write to all the cells evenly to minimize wear, the latter allows an Operating System to communicate unused (or deleted) data to an SSD.

Wear leveling and trim Support: Extending high-capacity SSD lifespan.

A higher capacity helps a modern SSD last even longer as it has more cells to write to and erase. Features like Wear Leveling further extend the life of a higher-capacity NVMe SSD as it’ll ensure all cells are wearing down evenly and has more cells to wear down.

Future-proofing
Buying smaller SSDs inevitably eats into those valuable M.2 slots on your motherboard. If you’re not on the most powerful platforms on the market today, chances are, you have 2-3 M.2 slots available to you.



It’s important to leverage each of those slots effectively. Why?

Well, if you run out of space on the 3 x 500GB M.2 SSDs, there’s no option but to swap out one for a higher-capacity replacement. I won’t even talk about the headache of moving all your existing data in those smaller drives to a new, larger one.

A high-capacity SSD from the get-go gives you more peace of mind as it’ll leave more slots to use for future expansion.

Planning ahead: Choose high-capacity SSDs for Future-Proofing.

Of course, moving your large files to an SSD instead of an HDD also has other benefits. For one, the lack of moving parts in an SSD translates to zero noise, lower power consumption, and lower temperatures – making your PC quieter and more power efficient in the long run.

More Compact Form Factor Options
One significant benefit of an SSD is the access to a form factor like M.2, which is compact and is a much better fit for use in both slim, portable devices and powerful workstations. It allows even portable devices to enjoy the fastest storage standards without compromising speed or capacity.


M.2 SSDs are compact and high-performance storage devices that offer uncompromising speed and high capacity.



What Does the Future Hold?
With each passing week, SSDs have become faster and denser (and, thankfully, cheaper). Each new PCIe generation allows for a faster link between the CPU and storage devices – equipping the industry with the tools to build even faster SSDs.

DirectStorage Approaches
If you’re wondering what you’ll do with all this speed, Microsoft’s DirectStorage pitch is the answer. As we’ve already seen, games are becoming more massive by the day. What if we told you that these games could be even larger! Yes, game developers compress these game files as much as possible to reduce their storage impact on disk.

However, playing the game requires this data to be decompressed, a task shouldered by the CPU. For example, a compressed asset in a game goes from your SSD/HDD to system memory (RAM) where a CPU decompresses it, before it is copied to your GPUs dedicated memory (VRAM) to be plopped into your game. The development of lightning-fast NVMe drives has allowed for a better solution – DirectStorage. Here, the decompression of game files and assets is handed to the GPU and data can directly be copied into your GPU VRAM. Microsoft touts up to a 3x improvement in loading times for a scene when using DirectStorage instead of traditional CPU-based decompression.

What’s more, it also frees up your CPU to keep its focus on real-time physics and simulations within the game you’re playing – further improving performance.

Fun fact: the recently-released (PC) game ‘Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’ is the first-ever game to incorporate GPU-based decompression using Microsoft’s DirectStorage API! We expect many major games to follow suit in the coming months and you’ll start to see a noticeable performance uplift when using faster SSDs compared to slower ones.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the Horizon
Well, speeds shouldn’t be a problem as PCIe 5.0 SSDs could boast a mind-boggling theoretical speed of up to 14,000 MBps (14 GB/s). That’s pretty ridiculous, considering last-gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs topped out at 7 GB/s, let alone comparing them to the fastest hard disks that max out at a measly 160 MB/s!

Several PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs with speeds of 10,000 MBps (10GB/s) are already on shelves, with many more slated to launch soon. In fact, MSI’s SPAITUM M570 PRO PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR is also in the works, and you’ll see more details in the coming months.

Grabbing the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives is a sure-shot way to future-proof any workload, albeit at a premium. If you’re not a fan of early adoption, you’ll always find a good bargain on high-capacity consumer-grade NVMe SSDs boasting PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 speeds (like the MSI SPATIUM M480 PRO 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD).