To heat sink or not to heat sink, that is the question. Now, that's a silly question, but in this case it's an appropriate one. Because the Nextorage NEM-PA 2TB is almost everything you want in an SSD. It has extremely fast read and write speeds, and thanks to its large SLC cache and 2GB of onboard DRAM, it is able to maintain these numbers even with large data transfers.

So why choose the Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB, whose read/write speeds are a bit slower and whose SLC cache is about half the size of Nextorage's?

Gaming motherboards released in the past few years typically have at least two M.2 slots for NVMe drives, with large metal heat sinks to prevent the SSD from reaching its thermal limits and slowing down. You can use heatsink-equipped SSDs in these slots, but you cannot use the motherboard's own cooling system.

In the worst case scenario, not only will this detract from the aesthetics of your gaming PC, it may also affect overall storage performance if the default heatsinks are used to cool the motherboard chipset. [The Solidigm P44 Pro does not come with a heatsink, so it can easily be added to any motherboard. If the latter does not have its own heatsink, then Nextorage can be used.

In fact, the performance difference between the two is not noticeable in games, and both use high-quality components that will last for years; Solidigm is the brand name of SK Hynix, which manufactures SSD NAND flash chips and controllers. Nextorage was founded by Sony and uses Micron and Phison for its flash and controllers.

Also, both are certified to work with the PlayStation 5, so if your console is running low on capacity, you can insert one of these into an SSD expansion slot and you'll soon have room to fill up with new games.

Both are the same price, so you can't go wrong with either one; SSD prices fluctuate quite a bit now, and have been cheaper than this in the past, but currently $140 for 2TB of fast NVMe storage is a very good deal. [More and more games are starting to use DirectStorage, such as "Horizon Forbidden West," and this technology makes games load very quickly and makes loading screens almost unnoticeable. Combined with a fast SSD, you can easily see what all the fuss is about with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X storage speeds.