A recent explainer from Engadget compares the two main types of solid-state drives: SATA and NVMe. The article notes that moving from a hard disk drive to either type of SSD is a significant improvement, but the two SSD formats are not interchangeable in terms of what they deliver.
The key distinction, according to the source, is performance. While both drive types replace older mechanical storage with flash memory, their performance characteristics differ substantially. That difference is central to deciding which one fits a particular setup or workload.
The piece does not go into specific benchmarks or prices, but it frames the choice as a performance-driven decision. For anyone upgrading storage, the main takeaway is that the SSD category is not uniform, and the performance gap between SATA and NVMe matters.