Your PC deserves the best SSD for gaming. The faster it is, the faster you can transfer files and load game textures. The bigger it is, the less time you have to spend deleting Shadowplay highlights to make room for new games. Good storage can make a big difference to your PC gaming experience.
Microsoft DirectStorage allows us to take full advantage of new PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives, and even though support is limited to just one game today, the best SSDs for gaming are still good for a whole lot more. That's especially true if you're still rocking a hard disk drive—you poor soul—literally any SSD will be an enormous upgrade. Please, treat yourself. You deserve better: Open worlds that used to take minutes to load will be on your screen in seconds.
Every SSD on this list has gone through our intensive benchmarking suite: A combination of real-world game loading tests and synthetic speed tests to find the best SSD for gaming. I've used each SSD as the primary drive on a new install of Windows 11 to check its performance.
You'll notice that our picks for the best SSDs are generally 1TB drives as a minimum; anything smaller than that, while cheaper, suffers a drop in speed. And honestly, with games being so big nowadays, a 250GB SSD isn't enough. 2TB and 4TB SSDs are pretty pricey, but if you find one on sale, go for it.
Where are the best SSD deals?
In the US:
- Amazon - Up to 50% off internal and external SSDs (opens in new tab)
- Walmart - Deals on internal and external SSDs (opens in new tab)
- B&H Photo - Save up to $50 on NVMe SSDs (opens in new tab)
- Best Buy - Great prices on Samsung SSDs (opens in new tab)
- Staples - Save up to 30% on a range of SSDs, USB sticks, and external SSDs (opens in new tab)
- Newegg - Plenty of NVMe SSDs (opens in new tab)
In the UK:
- Amazon UK - Save on HDDs, SDDs, and external drives (opens in new tab)
- Scan - SATA drives as low as £21 (opens in new tab)
- Box - Save up to £82 on Western Digital SN750 NVMe SSDs (opens in new tab)
- Ebuyer - 500GB SSDs starting from £34.98 (opens in new tab)
- Overclockers - Save up to £51 on Samsung SSDs (opens in new tab)
- Currys - Save £33.00 on WD Black SN750 (opens in new tab)
- Laptops Direct - Save on SSDs for your laptop (opens in new tab)
Best SSD for gaming
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Our favorite WD Black SN850X config:
(opens in new tab)The arrival of the new Ryzen 7000 CPU family means that PCIe Gen 5 is now a thing on both AMD and Intel platforms. But let’s be real. Your current PC almost certainly doesn’t have a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. Enter, therefore, the new WD Black SN850X, something of a last hurrah for Gen 4 SSDs. And it's the best one out there right now. SK Hynix's Platinum P41 might just have the edge on performance, but the lead is so negligible that the less expensive SN850X is our pick of the current SSD crop.
Our review configuration is clad head-to-toe in WD’s signature armour-style cooling. If that cooling solution has been optionally available on the old SN850, the new drive's revised thermal profile WD hasn’t. That’s specific to the SN850X.
Of course, if your motherboard comes with its own M.2 SSD cooling kit, you may not want to pay extra for a self-cooled SSD. Handily WD can cater for that. The new X model, like its forebear, can be had both with and without a heatsink, the latter option usefully coming in around $30/£25 cheaper.
In many regards, this new X model is a dead ringer for the existing SN850. We’re talking four lanes of PCIe Gen 4 connectivity in the now ubiquitous M.2 2280 form factor. But the 1TB model reviewed here is now the entry-level option. There’s no longer a 512GB model. What’s more, WD’s in-house controller chip, provided by compatriot SanDisk, has been revised, though detailed specifics aren't provided.
It improves game loading times courtesy of a so-called "read look-ahead" algorithm, which predictively caches game data.
Rather more specific to this WD drive is the latest 2.0 version of the company’s Game Mode drive management software. WD claims it improves game loading times courtesy of a so-called "read look-ahead" algorithm, which predictively caches game data. It now runs automatically, detecting when games are loaded. How much that kind of feature actually makes a difference in the real world is notoriously difficult to pin down. But it’s unlikely to be revolutionary.
Reduced operating temps are another clear benefit of this new drive. The old SN850 hit a toasty 77°C. The new drive hits just 58°C under sustained load. That's a very worthwhile improvement. Elsewhere, the gains are less obvious, albeit the SN850 was already a great drive. The 4K random access results are a little disappointing, showing little to no improvement. Likewise, don’t expect big gains in system-wide measures of performance like PC Mark 10.
All of which means that the new WD Black SN850X isn't exactly a revolutionary leap forward. Indeed, in the real world, you’ll struggle to notice the difference compared to the existing SN850 drive. But then that's because the SN850 is a very good SSD. The one exception to that is operating temperatures. Happily, this new X model runs unambiguously cooler.
For most PC applications, that probably doesn’t matter. But for small form factor rigs and perhaps a gaming laptop, every little can certainly help. On that note, for most applications, we'd probably go for the cheaper bare drive rather than this more expensive model with its heat spreader. The revised SN850X is inherently a cooler-running thing, after all.
Read our full WD Black SN850X SSD review (opens in new tab).
Our favorite SK Hynix Platinum P41 config:
(opens in new tab)Give it up for the new SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB. If that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, it also doesn't help that SK Hynix isn't the most familiar brand when it comes to the sort of consumer-focussed clobber that's aimed at gamers, including SSDs.
SK Hynix, of course, isn't actually new to this space, but the new P41 is arguably the brand's first tilt at a truly high-end M.2 drive. The old SK Hynix Gold P31 was a bit of a clunky old thing, limited as it was to the PCIe 3.0 interface and a controller chip with a mere four memory channels. The new Platinum P41? It's got it all.
Well, it's got it all if the context is PCIe 4.0 drives. The PCIe Gen 5 revolution is just around the corner. But for now, PCIe Gen 4 is not only where it's at. It's probably also the limit of your PC or laptop's capabilities. Anyway, the P41 has SK Hynix's brand new Gen 4 controller, known as Aries. While these things tend to be relatively mysterious black boxes, we do at least know that Aries has a claimed doubling of IOPS performance versus SK Hynix's old Cepheues chip, along with one-third faster IO speeds.
Not only that, it's also a quad-core design that sports eight memory controllers and allocates 2GB of DDR4 cache memory for this 2TB model. All of which makes it on par with top-end controllers like the Phison E18, as seen in various drives including the Seagate FireCuda 530 (opens in new tab), the SanDisk-powered WD Black SN850X, and the new Pascal chip in the Samsung 990 Pro.
The Platinum P41 is basically as fast as anything else out there.
As for the actual flash memory used, it's SK Hynix's latest and very greatest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. It's about as advanced as TLC memory currently gets, and SK Hynix claims a 40% performance boost over its old 128-layer chips. The net result is sequential read and write specs for this 2TB model of 7,000MB/s and 6,500MB/s respectively.
Finally, on the speeds and feeds, this 2TB drive is rated at 1,200TB for write endurance. As it happens, that's exactly the same as the new Samsung 990 Pro 2TB. But it's also a fair distance short of some other competing M.2 SSDs.
All of which just leaves the minor matter of how this drive actually performs. When it comes to peak sequential throughput, the Platinum P41 is basically as fast as anything else out there, bar a few rounding errors. OK, the Samsung 990 Pro is a bit faster at 7,462MB/s for reads to the P41's 7,375MB/s. But, honestly, it's inconsequential. The same goes for writes, where pretty much all the top drives will do just under 6.9GB/s.
Slightly less edifying are the P41's operating temps. At 71°C peak, it's a little toastier than we'd ideally like. Not that we actually saw any signs of any thermal throttling. But temps that high are a teensy bit of a long-term reliability concern.
So, this is a damn good drive. It's at least as good as anything else: trading blows with WD's Black SN850X, Samsung's upgraded 990 Pro, and the usual Phison E18-powered suspects. If you want a top-end PCIe 4.0 drive, there's certainly plenty of choices. And the SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB should certainly be on your shortlist.
Read our full SK Hynix Platinum P41 review (opens in new tab).
Our favorite WD Black SN770 config:
(opens in new tab)We've seen some incredible NVMe SSD releases recently, but they've tended to focus on top-end performance and come with prices to match. The WD_Black SN770 bucks this trend and like its predecessor, the SN750, is aimed at offering better value for money than outright performance.
The main way it achieves this is by being a DRAM-less SSD drive. This saves a big chunk of the manufacturer's bill of materials, and thanks to advances in the latest controllers, it can be surprising how little impact this has on performance. Such drives are slower, don't get me wrong, but this new SN770 still quotes read and writes of 5,150MB/s and 4,900MB/s respectively. Not bad.
The drive itself is a low-profile affair, with this 1TB model boasting a single NAND flash module at the back (actually a rebranded Kioxia BiCS5 112-Layer TLC chip) and the SanDisk controller towards the connector. Western Digital rarely reveals much about its controllers, and that's the case once again here.
The SN770 is available in four sizes—250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, although there's no 4TB option, which is a bit of a shame. If you want a seriously capacious drive, you're going to want to track down the Sabrent Rocket offerings, which go all the way up to 8TB.
It's in the real-world tests where the SN770 really struts its stuff.
The synthetic performance shows the SN770 trails more expensive drives in terms of reads, although the writes are much closer. The 4K performance is relatively impressive and shows that the SN770 has something to offer in this crowded marketplace. It's not too surprising that this drive outperforms Samsung's DRAM-less offering, as that is a PCIe 3.0 drive, after all, but the extent to which it does is impressive.
It's worth noting that this drive can get hot when pushed, just like the SN850 in fact. It hit 76°C after a long day of testing, although that was without any direct cooling on it at all, not even a heatsink. It should be fine in most systems, especially if your motherboard does come with some cooling solution.
It's in the real-world tests where the SN770 really struts its stuff. Basically, you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference between this drive and much faster offerings in most day-to-day operations. Given this is the cheaper drive right now, that counts for a lot. If you need better performance, then the SN850 is clearly the better drive, but you will pay considerably more for it.
The only problem issue for this drive is that we don't know for sure how fast a drive needs to be for Microsoft's DirectStorage. We know some developers have been targeting 5,000MB/s, which is where the SN770 sits in our testing. So it should be good, and for the money, it's very tempting. If you're a serious gamer though, we'd recommend going a little bit higher up the product stack, and grabbing that WD_Black SN850.
Read our full WD Black SN770 1TB review (opens in new tab).
Our favorite Seagate Firecuda 530 config:
(opens in new tab)Seagate may have taken a while to get into the solid state game, and especially the PCIe 4.0 market, but it has arrived with a bang with the Firecuda 530. With or without the heatsink (something that's necessary for its PlayStation 5 compatibility) the latest Seagate drive is a stunner.
Of course, the rated sequential read/write speeds are fantastic, but it's the endurance levels that really stand out compared to the competition. The 2TB drive we tested has an unprecedented 2,550 TBW rating when it comes to endurance, which is something you won't see this side of an SSD made for Chia mining.
The FireCuda 530 either matches or beats the big bois of the storage world.
The 2TB FireCuda 530's rated sequential read and write speed is 7300/6900 MB/s, and that’s pushing the limits of a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. For users looking at the other capacities, the 4TB drive has the same rating while the smaller 1TB and 500GB drives are rated for 7300/6000 MB/s and 7000/3000 MB/s respectively.
It combines brand-new Micron 176-Layer TLC NAND—the same memory Crucial is using to great effect with the new P5 Plus drives—with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller. Micron claims that its 176L TLC NAND is the best in the industry with a 30% smaller die size and a 35% improvement in read and write latency over its previous generation 96L NAND.
Apart from the PCMark 10 storage tests, the FireCuda 530 either matches or beats the big bois of the storage world, and when you add its leading sequential performance and endurance rating, the Seagate 530 is at least the equal of any consumer SSD on the market.
And in terms of performance the FireCuda 530 either matches or beats the big bois of the storage world, and when you add its leading sequential performance and endurance rating, the Seagate 530 is at least the equal of any consumer SSD on the market.
Read our full Seagate Firecuda 530 2TB review (opens in new tab).
Our favorite Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus config:
(opens in new tab)The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus was the first SSD to hit our lab using the new Phison E18 controller, which is the follow-up to the immensely popular Phison E16 controller found in basically every first-gen PCIe 4.0 drive. Offering peak reads of 7,100MB/s and writes of 6,600MB/s, it wasn't only a major step up from the first generation of PCIe 4.0 drives but a notable improvement over the Samsung 980 Pro, especially in terms of write performance.
In testing, this performance was born out too, with the faster write performance dominating Samsung's drive in the write tests. Real-world performance didn't always tell the same story, although the differences between these top drives can be slight. Even so, you're looking at AS SSD hitting 5,868MB/s for reads and 5,630MB/s for writes. Impressive stuff.
Not the fastest, nor the cheapest, but a happy middle ground of the two.
Sabrent has recently updated this drive to use faster NAND flash and also new firmware for the Phison E18 controller. The quoted performance doesn't change with this update, but some performance metrics have improved, and it's that bit closer to the competition while still offering solid value for money.
One thing worth noting is that the SSD market is in a state of flux at the moment, with pricing shifting almost daily. On release, this was the cheapest second-gen PCIe 4.0 you could lay your hands on, but there's often nothing between this and our top pick, the WD_Black SN850, which is why this is in the second spot.
This drive does run cooler than the SN850 though, which may be a factor if you're looking for a drive for a cramped case. Also, this is a drive worth keeping an eye on in the sales season as it's often keenly discounted, more so than the other drives here.
The new version of the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is a welcome release, even if it doesn't dramatically alter the drive's place in the market. We've had faster drives released recently, like the Kingston Fury Renegade (opens in new tab), along with more budget-focused offerings like the WD Black SN770 (opens in new tab), leaving the new Rocket 4 Plus in pretty much the same place as the original—not the fastest, nor the cheapest, but a happy middle ground of the two.
Read our full Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB review (opens in new tab).
Our favorite Silicon Power XS70 SSD config:
(opens in new tab)Silicon Power is a brand that probably doesn’t get much attention compared to the likes of Samsung or WD, but when you look at its latest XS70 NVMe SSD with its high-end specifications, it's clear that the brand name isn't everything. Armed with the latest Phison controller and high-performance NAND flash memory, a drive like the Silicon Power XS70 should have no problem competing with the best SSD on the market.
At $170, the XS70 is priced well for a high-performance 2TB SSD, but there's fierce competition from other third-party SSD makers in this price range. The Silicon Power XS70 2TB SSD is a 2280 (80mm length) M.2 PCIe NVMe drive. It combines Micron 176-Layer TLC NAND with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller and 2GB of DDR4 RAM. That combination is common to many of the best SSDs, including the highly regarded Seagate FireCuda 530 (opens in new tab)and Kingston KC3000.
It's a highly competitive SSD with great performance and an attractive design and offers good value for money.
The XS70 is designed with PS5 compatibility in mind so the heatsink isn’t as bulky as some others you might come across. It really does look good. Admittedly I'm talking about an SSD here, and its not the kind of thing you'll spend time looking at, but Silicon Power's designers deserve credit.
The Silicon Power XS70 2TB isn't revolutionary, but then nobody expects it to be. It's a highly competitive SSD with great performance, an attractive design and it offers good value for money. It's not perfect, it lacks its own software and hardware encryption but for a PS5 or PC gamer, that won't matter. Load it up with your game library and you'll love it.
The excellent all-around performance on offer from the XS70 makes it a very compelling option and it's easily worth considering if it’s price competitive at the time you look to make your purchase.
Read our full Silicon Power 2TB XS70 review (opens in new tab).
Our favorite Crucial MX500 config:
(opens in new tab)The Crucial MX500 is the only SATA drive left on our list of the best SSDs for gaming, but when the price delta between PCIe and SATA is so small, it's difficult to make an argument for the far slower technology. But, as there is a hard limit on the number of M.2 slots on your motherboard, there is still a place for SATA SSDs as secondary storage.
And the Crucial MX500 is one of the best. With SATA's maximum theoretical bandwidth limit of 600MB/s, it's nearly as quick as you'll get, and Crucial's drives have long been among the best-value options available too. This is the most affordable 1TB SATA drive you can pick up and it makes a great second home for your Steam and Epic libraries.
It will happily function as a boot drive on systems with no M.2 sockets, or at least no bootable M.2 sockets anyway. You will still be missing out on the zippy response of your operating system running on the SSD-specific NVMe protocol, but if that's not an option anyway, this drive will see you right.
Best SSD for gaming FAQ
How do we test SSDs?
We put every SSD we get in the PC Gamer labs through their paces in various benchmarks made up of a mix of synthetic tests and real-world applications. To ascertain a drives sequential throughput, we use ATTO SSD Benchmark for compressible data (a best-case scenario) and AS SSD for incompressible data (more realistic). We also test random throughput with AS SSD and a combination of CrystalDiskMark 7.0 and Anvil Pro.
When it comes to the real-world tests, we time how long it takes to copy a 30GB game install across the drive and use PCMark10 and Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, which includes a level load test. We also check operating temperatures to ensure that the drive isn't getting too hot and throttling.
What's the difference between SATA and NVMe PCIe-based SSDs?
As the prices of NVMe SSDs fall every day, we don't see much difference in cost between the best NVMe SSDs (opens in new tab) and their SATA-based equivalents. When the cheapest 2.5-inch 1TB SATA SSD is only $24 less than an equivalent capacity NVMe PCIe drive (and four times slower), why bother with older SATA technology when you can move into the future for so cheap?
Where SATA's theoretical performance limit is 600MB/s, and PCIe 3.0's is 4,000MB/s, PCIe 4.0 SSDs can double that figure to a maximum of 8,000MB/s. The current top speed of available Gen4 drives is around 7,000MB/s, which is double that of the previous generation.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs should exceed 10,000MB/s and onwards up to their theoretical limit around 16,000MB/s. But this only matters if you can fit an NVMe SSD in your machine.
Can I fit an NVMe SSD on my motherboard?
The M.2 socket has been included on motherboards of all kinds for many years now, so the chances are that there's a spare slot sitting inside your existing gaming PC. Check out your motherboard's specs page online before pulling the trigger on an NVMe SSD purchase, though, to be sure. Those harboring a board that's a few years old now, do yourself a favor and make sure it supports booting from an NVMe drive first. Not all older motherboards do, especially if you're going back multiple CPU generations.
If you don't have any NVMe slots, you can buy expansion add-in cards that will offer one or more NVMe slots in exchange for one of your PCIe slots on your motherboard, just be aware that these are at an added cost and take up precious room.
Can you put a PCIe 4.0 SSD in a 3.0 slot?
Yes, you can. They M.2 socket is identical between the two generations of interface and so a PCIe 4.0 SSD will fit comfortably inside a PCIe 3.0 slot. They will also function perfectly well too, except the Gen4 drive will be limited by the speed of the older interface.
The same goes for PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives. You're just wasting the potential of the higher-speed drive by dropping it into a slower slot, is all, but it will work.
What PCIe generation should I look for?
Right now, PCIe 4.0 is the go-to PCIe generation. That's because it offers a high speed at a reasonable cost. The newest SSDs on the market offer PCIe 5.0 capability, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth an SSD can run at. However, these are few and far between and awfully expensive. Also the first drives of any PCIe generation tend to end up much slower than what that generation is truly capable of.
Here are the rough speeds for each PCIe generation over x4 lanes:
PCIe 1.0: 1GB/s
PCIe 2.0: 2GB/s
PCIe 3.0: 4GB/s
PCIe 4.0: 8GB/s
PCIe 5.0: 16GB/s
How big an SSD should I buy?
The easy answer is: as big as you can afford. With SSDs, the higher capacity, the quicker they are. That's because you end up with more memory dies plumbed into a multi-channel memory controller, and that extra parallelism leads to higher performance.
We would traditionally say that an entry-level SSD should come in at least 512GB in order to pack in your operating system, for slick general system speed, and your most regularly played games. But such is the increasing size of modern games that a 1TB SSD is increasingly looking like the minimum recommendation. That's also where the performance starts to go up too.
