How to choose the right storage

How much storage do you actually need?

Look at what you have now and where it went. Most people discover that a handful of games account for most of the space, and that the rest is years of downloads nobody has opened.

1TB is the honest starting point for a gaming machine, because modern titles run large and you will keep three or four installed. 512GB is fine for a machine that mostly runs a browser and a billing package.

Leave room. An SSD that is almost completely full slows down and wears faster, so plan to keep roughly fifteen percent free.

NVMe, SATA SSD or hard drive?

NVMe drives plug straight into the motherboard and are the fastest of the three. SATA SSDs are slower but still far quicker than mechanical drives, and they matter mainly when you have run out of M.2 slots. Hard drives are slow, and they are cheap per terabyte.

The right answer for most builds is an NVMe drive for Windows and everything you use, and a hard drive only if you have a genuine need for bulk cheap space.

Where you will notice NVMe most is boot time, program launches and game level loading. Where you will not notice it is copying files to a slow external drive, which is limited by the other end.

Is Gen5 worth paying for?

For most people, no. The jump from a mechanical drive to any SSD is enormous. The jump from Gen3 to Gen4 is noticeable in file transfers. The jump from Gen4 to Gen5 is difficult to feel outside a benchmark.

Gen5 drives also run hot and usually need a heatsink, which in a small cabinet is a real consideration. Unless you move very large video files all day, put the money into capacity instead.

Do you still need a hard drive?

Sometimes. For archives, for CCTV recording, for years of raw footage you rarely open, cost per terabyte still favours mechanical drives by a wide margin.

What a hard drive should not be is the drive Windows lives on. If a machine on your desk still boots from a mechanical drive, cloning it to an SSD is the single biggest speed improvement available, and it costs less than any other upgrade. That is true even on an old machine.

How long will an SSD last?

Longer than most people keep a PC. Drives carry a rated endurance figure measured in terabytes written, and normal home and office use gets nowhere near it in the warranty period.

What actually kills drives here is heat and power. A drive in a hot unventilated cabinet through a Delhi summer, on a supply that browns out during a cut, has a harder life than the spec sheet assumes. A UPS is cheap insurance for the data on it.

From the counter

Nobody walks in asking about backups. They walk in when a drive has already failed and the only copy of a wedding shoot was on it. Sometimes we can recover it. Often we cannot, and that conversation is the worst part of this job.

Two copies on two different drives, and anything you would be sick to lose gets a third copy somewhere else. That is the whole strategy.

Frequently asked questions

Can I move my existing Windows install to a new SSD?

Yes. Cloning software copies the whole drive including Windows and your programs, so you do not reinstall anything. It is the usual route when someone upgrades from a hard drive. You need both drives connected at once, which on a desktop is no trouble. If the new drive is smaller than the old one, you have to clear space on the old drive first. We do this at the counter while you wait if you would rather not risk it.

Does an SSD need defragmenting?

No, and running a traditional defrag on one causes unnecessary writes. Windows already knows the difference and runs the correct maintenance on its own, which for an SSD means TRIM, the command that tells the drive which blocks are free. Leave the default schedule alone. If someone tells you to defrag an SSD to speed it up, they are working from habits that stopped applying a decade ago.

How many M.2 slots does my motherboard have?

Entry boards often have one, mainstream boards two, and higher end boards three or four. It matters more than people expect, because running out of slots means falling back to SATA drives later. Check the board specification before you buy, and note that on some boards using a particular M.2 slot disables some SATA ports. That detail is in the manual and it catches people out.

Are cheap unbranded SSDs a bad idea?

Usually. The controller and the memory inside decide how a drive behaves when it is nearly full and under sustained load, and that is exactly where cheap drives collapse. They also tend to have short warranties and no service presence in India, so a failure means the drive is gone. For the small difference in price on a 1TB drive, a known brand with a local warranty is the better buy.

Should games go on the SSD or the hard drive?

On the SSD if there is room. Level loading and texture streaming both improve, and some newer games assume fast storage and stutter without it. If you have a large library and limited SSD space, keep the games you are currently playing on the SSD and move the rest to the hard drive. Both storefronts let you move an installed game between drives without redownloading it.

Browse what we have in stock: 1TB SSDs, 2TB SSDs, 2TB hard drives.

Read next

• How to choose the right RAM
• How to choose the right motherboard
• How to choose the right UPS

Written by Shreyansh Jain, who runs Get Right PC and is second generation in Nehru Place. Published 2026-09-24. Last updated 2026-09-24.