Photoshop Scratch Disk

Are you looking for an SSD you can install inside your computer, or plug in as an external volume?

The links posted by Lumigraphics have some great suggestions for bare SSDs that would go inside a computer. If this is what you want to do, you do first need to verify whether the available SSD slot in your computer has an NVMe or SATA connection. Either works great as a scratch disk, you just have to make sure you buy the right kind for the slot type your computer has.

If you just want an external SSD you can plug into a USB port, you can take any of the bare drives in those links, plug them into an empty USB-C enclosure that would cost $15-50, and then you’d have an external SSD. Or you can buy ready-to-go external SSDs; some of the brands used by many photographers are Crucial, Samsung, OWC, Glyph, and Oyen Digital. In all cases, for good scratch disk performance use enclosures and cables that support USB 3 at 10 gigabits per second (10Gb/sec) or higher.

If your computer has a USB-C port that supports Thunderbolt 3 or later, those are capable of up to 40Gb/sec. However, the cables and enclosures for Thunderbolt cost several times more, so they may not be worth it for scratch disk use.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html

https://www.pcworld.com/article/407542/best-ssds.html

https://www.techradar.com/news/best-solid-state-drives-ssds