Best SSD 2017

Winner: Crucial MX500

This year's best SSD came in just a few weeks ago with the Crucial MX500. While the MX300 wasn't Crucial's most impressive release, the MX500 is certainly one of them. It is built on the foundation of Micron 64-layer TLC flash and fuses that with a Silicon Image controller that is cheaper to use than the Marvell controller we've seen on previous MX Series models. Crucial successfully improved the performance aspects of the drive, which now delivers performance that's almost on par with MLC drives. Thanks to the cost benefits of using TLC and the cheaper controller, the drive is the most affordable SSD around, while still delivering excellent performance. In a market where price per gigabyte is becoming more and more important, this makes for a winning combination. Crucial also bumped the MX500's warranty to five years, which brings it to the same level as competitor Samsung and helps remedy trust issues users who are still wary of the new technology might have with TLC.

Read our review

Runner-up: Samsung 960 Pro

Our winning drive, the Crucial MX500, uses the aging SATA storage interface. 2017 saw the widespread implementation of M.2 NVMe on nearly all new motherboards - an interface that provides much higher bandwidth and lower latency. This is the future. Our runner-up here is the Samsung 960 Pro, which delivers breathtaking storage performance on the new interface, while still being reasonably priced - unlike the Intel Optane drives, which are smaller, but way too expensive to see a widespread user base any time soon. Current real-life applications do not yet see the huge performance differences that spec sheets want to make you believe, which is the reason we picked the MX500 to lead this category.

Looking forward to 2018

In 2018, we'll see even more NVMe drives appear on the market. Hopefully, one of these new drives will find a way to address the thermal throttling that usually comes with these small-form-factor, high-speed drives. We also heard news of Intel increasing 3D XPoint production, which could lead to lower prices for the Optane series. Other flash technologies, like Samsung Z-NAND, should make a debut in 2018, too. I don't doubt that flash memory pricing will go down in 2018 as well, which will lead to cheaper SSDs overall, though pricing will probably not catch up to HDDs just yet.