Boot drives rarely get the attention they deserve. The type and capacity of your C: drive significantly affects how fast your system boots, how quickly your programs load, and how long you have to spend tapping your toe before you can actually get your game on.
It’s where all your programs get installed and files get downloaded by default, making your boot drive a huge potential bottleneck for everything you do in your operating system. So why are the boot drives on most modern PCs still so small? To be fair, plummeting solid-state drive (SSD) prices have now thankfully relegated the near-tortuous experience of a spinning-platter boot drive to the past.
Just how far have SSD prices fallen? Intel’s X25-m launched at $595 for the 80GB model in 2008. For roughly a third of that price ($209) a decade later, I bought a Crucial MX500 drive with 25 times that Intel drive’s capacity (2TB). And since then, prices have continued to crater, to the point that some of the more affordable 4TB M.2 SSDs often hover just above the $200 mark.
But even on premium laptops and gaming rigs today, system sellers (be they boutique builders or big-name PC makers) often seem out of touch with the realities of modern pricing and storage needs.
