Best SSD for gaming 2024

The WD Black SN850X is the fastest SSD you can buy, fully making use of its PCIe 4.0 interface with lightning-fast sequential read and write speeds of 7,300MB/s and 6,600MB/s, respectively.

This level of performance not only improves game loading times, but you should notice your gaming PC boots faster and more quickly handles general tasks. You’ll always get the most out of the drive while playing games, thanks to its Game Mode 2.0 toggle in the included software.

If you’re worried about potential thermal throttling impacting the WD Black SN850X, you can pick it up with an optional heatsink for peace of mind. Better still, the heatsink comes with a splash of RGB, so it can look cool while staying cool.

Read our WD Black SN850X review.

Now a long-standing veteran of the SSD market, the Samsung 980 Pro can often be found at a bargain price, and it’s still fast enough for most people’s needs. Making full use of the PCIe 4.0 interface, Samsung says this drive can read at up to 7,000MB/s, and it hit a solid 6,866MB/s in our tests.

The WD Black SN850X above is quicker for write speeds and game loading times, but the 980 Pro is often available for a cheaper price, and you’ll barely notice the difference between the two drives in most real-world use. Besides, the top write speed of 5,000MB/s still puts the Samsung 980 Pro well ahead of any PCIe 3.0 SSDs. Samsung offers a useful software package, including migration software for easy transfers from your existing Windows installation to your new drive.

This drive throttled without a heatsink in our tests, so make sure you either buy a model with a heatsink pre-fitted or use one of your motherboard’s M2 heatsinks if it has them. Keep an eye on prices, though, as they often fluctuate. If the WD Black SN850X is on offer and cheaper than the Samsung 980 Pro, it’s the better SSD to buy.

Read our Samsung 980 Pro review.

If you don’t have a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot on your motherboard, and you want to push your PCIe 4.0 M.2 connector as far as it will go, then the Samsung 990 Pro is the drive for you. While this drive couldn’t meet Samsung’s 7,450MB/s claims in our tests, its top speed of 7,198MB/s still makes it faster than any other PCIe 4.0 drive we’ve reviewed. If performance is your top priority, this is a great SSD.

When we first reviewed the 990 Pro, we gave it a bit of a kicking for its high price, but the cost has since come crashing down, to the point where it’s often going for under $100 for a 1TB capacity. That’s a great price for the performance on offer.

However, this drive does get hot when it’s running at full speed, so we recommend either buying the heatsink version or using at least a basic M.2 heatsink on your motherboard. In terms of game load times, there’s also no benefit to buying this drive over the WD Black SN850X, but if you regularly shift around large amounts of data, this is now a fast drive for a reasonable price.

Read our full Samsung 990 Pro review.

Speed above all else is the priority of the T705, as the Crucial SSD barrels ahead of its competition with power to deliver the fastest speeds we’ve seen yet from PCIe 5.0 storage. While it’s quick, though, it does come with some caveats.

The T705 is staggeringly speedy, with read and write performance of up to 14,500MB/s (14.5GB/s) and 12,700MB/s (12.7GB/s), respectively. While it can hit these speeds in short bursts, prolonged stress can see the passive heatsink falter, bringing the Crucial SSD’s sky-high ambitions crashing down in an Icarus-like fashion.

These problems don’t affect gaming performance, which is naturally of a high standard. That said, the T705 suffers from the same problem as all other PCIe 5.0 SSDs, in that higher speeds don’t have any tangible benefit in games relative to PCIe 4.0 drives (at least for now).

Class-leading performance naturally comes with a higher price too, and the T705 is no exception, with its price coming in much higher than slower PCIe 5.0 SSDs. You can knock off a few bucks by opting for a model without a heatsink, but this drive needs some form of cooling to be considered worth using.

Read our Crucial T705 review.

NVMe SSDs will undoubtedly replace their SATA brethren, but there’s still plenty of value to be had in drives that use the ageing interface like the Samsung 870 EVO. While its sequential read and write speeds may seem paltry in the face of PCIe storage, it’s still plenty fast for most games and is undeniably faster than any hard drive.

If you prioritize capacity over speed, opting for the Samsung 870 EVO could be a smart move. You can pick it up in sizes that go all the way up to 4TB, meaning you won’t have to worry about rehoming your Steam library and it costs much less than any M.2 SSD with the same amount of space.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs like the MP700 Pro push storage speeds well above PCIe 4.0 but, for the moment, their performance often comes with added cost and thermal considerations. Corsair’s MP700 Pro makes dealing with these difficulties the easiest of any drive we’ve tested, with active cooling in place of an enormous passive heatsink and a price that doesn’t break the bank.

Featuring respective read and write speeds of up to 12,400MB/s (12.4GB/s) and 11,800MB/s (11.8GB/s), the MP700 Pro is one of the fastest SSDs you can slot into your system. These specs naturally make the drive an excellent choice for gaming, but improvements compared to cheaper, competing PCIe 4.0 drives are minimal, even in games that support DirectStorage.

For those that require a dual-purpose drive, though, particularly for scenarios where prolonged read and write speeds are a priority, the MP700 Pro emerges a cut above all other PCIe 5.0 SSDs thanks to its active heatsink. While its fan curve sadly can’t be configured, the out-of-the-box performance ensured the temperature of Corsair’s drive peaked at just 65°C in our testing.

Corsair also offers the MP700 Pro with a Hydro X Series water block, for enthusiast builders rocking a custom water-cooling loop. While there is sadly no passive heatsink available for the SSD, you can grab it without any heatsink whatsoever and place your speeds at the mercy of your motherboard heatsinks if you wish. However, given how hot PCIe 5.0 storage gets, we strongly recommend opting for the model with the active cooler, especially as it only costs $10-20 extra.

Read our Corsair MP700 Pro review.

Building on the affordable SN570, Western Digital’s Blue SN580 NVMe SSD is a capable gaming SSD with up to 2TB of storage and a solid 900TBW endurance. It offers you respectable read and write speeds for one of the lowest prices on the market.

During testing, our reviewer found that the random 4K performance of the SN580 was a fair bit slower than the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs we tested. But it’s the best you can get under $100 without sacrificing capacity, speed, or both. It’s the top option for building a gaming PC on a budget.

Read our WD Blue SN580 review.

When you’re looking to upgrade to the best gaming laptop SSD, you want to hit a balance between thermals and performance. You don’t want a drive that will end up throttling because it’s getting too hot inside the tight confines of your laptop, but you also don’t want to be stuck with slow speeds. This is where the Samsung 990 Evo hits just the right balance.

Don’t be fooled by the PCIe 5.0 claims Samsung makes about this drive, as it only uses two PCIe 5.0 lanes, which defeats the object of it. However, it does work well as a power-efficient 4x PCIe 4.0 SSD that doesn’t need a heatsink, making it ideal for installing in a laptop. It can read at up to 5,000MB/s, which is faster than any PCIe 3.0 SSD, and its 4,200MB/s write speed is solid too.

What’s more, this drive is often heavily discounted, meaning you can often pick up a 2TB drive for under $120, which is a bargain for that level of capacity. Add the fact that doesn’t need a heatsink to prevent it from throttling, and you have an ideal laptop SSD upgrade.

As you probably already know, there’s not enough room to squeeze a standard 2280 M.2 SSD inside your Steam Deck, or another gaming handheld for that matter. You can still reap the benefits of fast storage in your deck, though, thanks to its M.2 2230 connector, and the TeamGroup MP44S is just the right size for it.

What’s more, this drive’s use of the 4x PCIe 4.0 interface means its performance is quicker than you’d expect for such a small drive. In our tests, it happily reads at 5,089MB/s and writes at 3,702MB/s, which is even quicker than TeamGroup’s claims, and that’s without a heatsink too. What’s more, you can buy this drive in a huge 2TB capacity, giving you loads of space to install the best Steam Deck games.

The downside to this, of course, is that the Steam Deck’s PCIe 3.0 interface means you can’t run this drive at its full speed in the deck, but it still runs as fast as any other top-end PCIe 3.0 drive, and its PCIe 4.0 support gives it some future proofing for the Steam Deck 2, while also making it an ideal upgrade for the Asus ROG Ally X. This drive gives you loads of high-speed handheld storage, and it’s also reasonably priced.