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The best SSD for computer gaming is a key component for a responsive and speedy gaming PC. Shifting from an HDD to an SSD is like no other upgrade for your gaming PC. Suddenly everything is right there at your fingertips—no hanging around while data chugs around your rig like a rusty steam train. So, if you’re not planning to invest in one soon, you really need to rethink your priorities.
To speed up your storage reads and writes, you need a fast SSD. Our picks are most usually based on market-friendly, tested, and trusted brands/products with wonderful reviews from the world of techies who know what they want and what’s best for them.
Our Top 3 For Best SSD For Gaming
Contents
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus
Attractive Design Solid State Drive For Gaming
There are very few 4TB NVMe SSDs on the market today and none are faster than this model. If you want the fastest 4TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD on the market you can stop looking.
The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is the highest capacity SSD available today that can reach performance highs of 7GB/s. It comes with a decent price point and 1yr standard with the option to register and increase the warranty to 5-years.
Powered by Phison PS5018-E18 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller and Micron’s 96L TLC flash, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus boast some serious hardware that enables it to shatter write speed records.
Not only is it fast, with its black PCB and matching black PCB and copper tone heat spreader, but it’s also a very attractive M.2. At prices that undercut both several others it’s a great value for those looking to save some cash, but still, get that responsive PCIe 4.0 performance.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fast sequential performance
- Competitive pricing
- Attractive design
Cons
- Not quite as responsive or efficient as WD
- No AES 256-bit encryption
WD Black SN850 1TB NVMe SSD
Impressive Speed Solid State Drive For Gaming
The Black SN850 is WD’s first NVMe drive to support the new super-fast PCIe Gen 4 standard, and goodness what a way to make an entrance. Not only does it offer significantly faster write speeds than any in its range at the moment, but it’s cheaper, too.
Not by much, all told, and certainly not enough to take the sting out of buying a PCIe 4.0 SSD in general, but when you stack them up side by side with any other in its range, the WD Black SN850 is the clear winner here.
The Western Digital Black SN850 makes a fashionably late entrance to the PCIe 4.0 party. It’s capable of hitting 7,000MB/s reads and 5,300MB/s writes in sequential transfers, which is well beyond the other drives’ capabilities. That’s because it uses the latest PCIe 4.0 interface, which has double the theoretical bandwidth limit of the other PCIe 3.0 drives.
Its performance ultimately defines any SSD; the WD SN850 really stands out from the crowd. The synthetic benchmarks, spearheaded by ATTO and AS SSD, show that this is very much a second-generation PCIe 4.0 drive, with peak sequential read speeds knocking on 6,750MB/s and 5,920MB/s, respectively. Writes are lower than the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, but still healthy, at either side of 5GB/s.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Impressive speed
- Blistering PCIe 4.0 throughput
- Excellent real-world performance
Cons
- Runs hot
- Quite expensive
WD Black SN750 1TB
In-House Technology Solid State Drive For Gaming
Western Digital’s entry into the SSD arena was a long while coming, especially at the speedier end of the market, but the WD Black SN750 was arguably worth the wait. It nails solid-state performance on par with the best consumer Samsung EVO SSDs and severely undercuts them on price.
The combination of an in-house memory controller and Toshiba memory (also essentially in-house after the acquisition of the SanDisk/Toshiba memory division) means what we’ve got here is a drive that can match Samsung in its build methodology too. And that all means WD can be very aggressive on how much it charges people for the privilege of having a speedy PCIe SSD in their gaming PC.
There is a more expensive version on offer with a heatsink attached to it. Still, so long as you don’t bury your drive in an M.2 slot beneath your GPU, you should be golden, and the SN750 will maintain peak performance without burning out and without any extra SSD cooling.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Competitive pricing
- Serious SSD performance
- In-house technology
Cons
- Could use a few more firmware optimizations
- Big premium for heatsink
Conclusion
Considering the huge install sizes of modern games, only rising, having the best SSD for gaming is an increasingly crucial part of any modern gaming PC builds. The HDD vs. SSD storage war isn’t necessarily over, but we couldn’t recommend an old spinning platter as the main drive in your gaming PC.
At one point, having a small SSD as a boot drive was a luxury. Now, at the advent of 4K and next-gen gaming, if you want to play your games at the highest speeds possible, investing in a quality SSD is your best bet. It should help you to defend against the incoming storage onslaught.
Finding the best SSD or solid-state drive for your needs is important if you want the best gaming PC or laptop, or you just want a snappy productivity machine.
A slow storage drive makes for a big bottleneck, forcing your processor (even if it’s one of the best CPUs) to sit there twiddling its clock cycles, waiting for data.
Our pick of the best SSDs range from 1TB to as far as 4TB drives because smaller SSDs, though cheaper, lose performance. And, with games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Destiny 2, and Modern Warfare taking up well over 150GB each, you need a lot of storage space these days to avoid a whole lot of inventory management.
Finally, we strongly recommend the WD Black SN850 1TB NVMe SSD even if the WD Black SN850’s game load times aren’t quite as lightning fast as its transfer speeds or random read and write times, this is still an exceptional SSD that’s leaps and bounds ahead of its current competition.
It’s not only the best NVMe drive you’ll get for its price range which offer the kind of performance, speed, and value for your money delivery you’re looking for but it has also managed to outpace the Sabrent drive, hence why it replaced it on this list. To see similar products, visit Amazon.com
