SSD specifications, compared against the category
A read speed means nothing without the interface it was measured on. This site works out what an ordinary drive in each interface class actually does, so you can see where any particular one sits against it.
The interface sets the ceiling, and no amount of money moves it.
A SATA SSD tops out around its bus limit whatever it costs, while an NVMe drive on PCIe runs many times faster for a price difference that is often smaller than the gap between two SATA drives. That single fact decides more about the speed you get than any other line on the box, and it is the one most listings bury under a model name.
The classes
Every drive here sits in one class, assigned from its own specification table and title rather than from the search that surfaced it. Comparisons are made inside a class, because a median across all of them would describe nothing anyone is shopping for.
- NVMe SSDs — Drives on the PCIe bus, where the interface stops being the limit and the controller starts to matter.
- SATA SSDs — Drives on the older bus, where every model meets the same ceiling and the differences are elsewhere.
- Portable SSDs — External drives, where the cable and the port decide the speed rather than the flash inside.
- PS5 SSDs — Drives that meet Sony’s stated floor for the console’s expansion slot, and what that floor rules out.
What a baseline is
A baseline is the median of a specification within one class and one capacity band, with values beyond 1.5× the interquartile range left out of the calculation so a single odd listing cannot move it. Where a group holds fewer than 8 drives, no baseline is published — below that a median describes the sample rather than the market.
What we do not do
We do not test drives. There is no lab here and no benchmark run: everything on this site is derived from what manufacturers publish in their own listings, read consistently across the whole corpus. Where a listing does not state a specification, the page says not stated rather than filling in a plausible default.
We do not publish star ratings or review counts, and we do not print exact prices — a price captured on a scrape date is wrong by the time you read it. The methodology page sets out how the corpus is cleaned and where the process fails, and the about page says who compiles it.
This site earns a commission on qualifying purchases made through its links. That pays for the work and decides nothing about what the figures say — the disclosure sets out exactly what it does and does not mean, and the privacy policy covers what happens when you follow one.
Start with the finder
The ssd finder asks 4 questions — how much capacity, what you can spend, which bus it runs on and whether you want a particular brand — and places every result against the median for its own class and band.