Why sub-$100 NVMe now beats SATA for any new build
Two years ago, NVMe drives under $100 meant PCIe 3.0 with 3,500 MB/s reads — fast, but not dramatically better than SATA's 550 MB/s for most tasks. In 2026, $60–95 buys you legitimate PCIe 4.0 drives with 4,150–5,100 MB/s reads. The Crucial P3 Plus 1TB, which was $120 at launch in 2022, now sells for $55–65 regularly. The practical implication: if your motherboard has an M.2 slot (any desktop board from 2019+ and most laptops from 2020+), buying a SATA SSD no longer makes sense at 1TB. The price difference between a $60 SATA SSD and a $65 NVMe SSD is $5 — you get 9× the sequential read speed for $5 more. At 2TB and above, SATA SSDs still undercut NVMe on price: a 2TB SATA drive costs $90–110 vs $120–145 for a 2TB NVMe. If raw capacity per dollar is your priority and you'll use it for media storage (not your OS drive), SATA at 2TB remains a reasonable choice. But for your primary system drive, NVMe wins at the sub-$100 price point in 2026.
Best overall under $100: Samsung 980 1TB (~$80–90)
The Samsung 980 is PCIe 3.0, rated at 3,500 MB/s sequential read and 3,000 MB/s write. It is not the fastest NVMe drive in 2026, but it is the most consistently available and the most proven. Samsung's TLC NAND and in-house controller are among the most reliable combinations in the consumer SSD market. The 1TB model carries a 5-year warranty and 600 TBW endurance — high for its price tier. For gaming: the 980 loads games in 8–10 seconds from a cold start, identical to PCIe 4.0 drives in practical tests. DirectStorage titles benefit from 4.0 speeds, but most games in 2026 have not yet implemented DirectStorage fully. For OS use, app loading, and general file work, 3,500 MB/s is completely sufficient. Who should buy it: anyone who wants a reliable, budget-priced drive from a proven brand and doesn't need maximum sequential throughput. It's the safest $85 you can spend on storage.
Best PCIe 4.0 under $100: Crucial P3 Plus 1TB (~$57–65)
The Crucial P3 Plus uses Micron's QLC NAND with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, delivering 5,000 MB/s sequential read and 3,600 MB/s write — real PCIe 4.0 performance at a budget price. In mid-2026, the 1TB model has fallen to $55–65 at major retailers, making it the cheapest PCIe 4.0 drive on the market by a significant margin. The trade-off: QLC NAND has a smaller SLC write cache than TLC NAND. When writing large files that exhaust the cache (typically files above 20–30GB on a 1TB drive), write speeds drop to 600–800 MB/s. For gaming PC use — where you're mostly reading game data, not writing large sequential files — this doesn't matter. For video editing or large file transfers, it's worth knowing. The P3 Plus includes a 5-year warranty and 220 TBW at 1TB — lower endurance than the Samsung 980 but sufficient for 10+ years of typical home use. It's the best value PCIe 4.0 drive available in 2026 and the default recommendation for new builds on a budget.
PCIe 4.0 alternative: WD Blue SN580 1TB (~$60–75)
The WD Blue SN580 is Western Digital's mainstream PCIe 4.0 budget drive. It reads at 4,150 MB/s and writes at 4,000 MB/s — slightly slower than the P3 Plus on reads but faster on writes, and it uses TLC NAND rather than QLC. TLC has a higher sustained write speed after the SLC cache is exhausted: the SN580 maintains 1,500–2,000 MB/s in sustained writes vs 600–800 MB/s for the P3 Plus. For anyone copying large files regularly, this matters. The SN580 carries a 5-year warranty and 300 TBW at 1TB — better endurance than the P3 Plus. It typically sells for $65–75, putting it $5–15 more than the P3 Plus. The extra cost is worth it if you do large file work (video editing, VM snapshots, software compilation). For pure gaming and OS use, the cheaper P3 Plus is the better value. Both the P3 Plus and SN580 are backward compatible with PCIe 3.0 motherboards — they'll run at PCIe 3.0 speeds (around 3,500 MB/s) if your slot doesn't support PCIe 4.0, which is still faster than any SATA SSD.