Cheapest laptop SSDs & hard drives ranked by price per terabyte

Upgrading a laptop: which drive actually fits?

Laptop storage upgrades fail for one reason more than any other: the drive bought does not physically fit. There are two shapes in play, and the table above lists both, ranked by real £/TB. Before you order, find out which your machine takes — the manufacturer's spec sheet or a teardown video for your exact model number will tell you in a minute and save a return.

• 2.5" SATA: the traditional drive bay, found in laptops up to around 2016 and still in many budget and business models. Note the thickness — 7mm is standard, and a 9.5mm drive will not close in a 7mm bay. SATA caps out around 550 MB/s, which is still roughly ten times a mechanical drive.
• M.2: a bare stick that screws flat to the motherboard, and the norm in anything modern or thin. Most are M.2 2280 (80mm long), but some compact laptops take only 2242 or 2230 — the shorter sizes are much less common and cost more per terabyte.
• NVMe or SATA M.2? They look almost identical and are not interchangeable in every machine. An NVMe stick in a SATA-only slot may simply not be detected. Check the slot type, then see NVMe vs SATA.
• What to watch for: in a laptop, sustained speed is limited by heat long before the drive's rated figure, so paying a premium for a headline Gen 5 number rarely changes how the machine feels. Endurance (TBW) and warranty are the better tie-breakers. Many ultrabooks also have their storage soldered — not upgradeable at all.

For most people the honest advice is this: if the laptop still has a mechanical hard drive, almost any SSD in the list above will transform it, and there is no need to buy the fastest one. If it already has an SSD and you simply want more room, compare £/TB at 1TB and 2TB — 2TB is usually the better value per terabyte. See also all M.2 SSDs, all 2.5" drives, and SSD vs HDD or how much storage do I need if you are still deciding on size.