Hero Image I was browsing SSDs the other day, and the marketing has gotten totally out of hand. Sequential read speeds of 14,900 MB/s plastered across the box in huge font, benchmark graphs that look like they belong in a data center, and claims that imply your game will load before you even click the shortcut.

It's mostly noise. The difference between a good PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive and a wildly expensive PCIe 5.0 drive is basically invisible when you're just playing games. The things that actually matter — capacity, how hot the drive gets, and the price tag — are what determine if you'll be happy with the drive two years from now.

I grabbed four of the most popular gaming SSDs this year and ran them through my own daily usage to see what's actually worth your money.

PCIe 4.0 vs. PCIe 5.0: The Honest Answer for Gaming

This is where it's so easy to overspend, so let's get it out of the way first.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs (like the Crucial T705) offer sequential read speeds up to 14,500 MB/s. That's roughly twice what a great PCIe 4.0 drive (like the Samsung 990 Pro) offers. That sounds transformative, and in a spreadsheet, it is. But in games? It currently is not.

Here's why: games don't stream data in perfectly sequential bursts. They load assets in small, random reads — textures, geometry chunks, audio files. The bottleneck is almost never raw sequential throughput; it's random read performance.

When I measured actual game load times in Cyberpunk 2077 and Flight Simulator across both Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives, the difference was literally half a second. A PCIe 5.0 drive loaded a level in 3.7 seconds instead of 4.1 seconds. That's technically real, but it's not the doubling of load speeds the specs suggest. And it comes at a massive price premium.

For gaming alone, PCIe 4.0 is absolutely the value choice. Only buy PCIe 5.0 if you also do large file transfers, heavy video editing, or professional workloads where sequential speed actually saves you time.

The SSDs Actually Worth Buying

1. Samsung 990 Pro (The Consistent All-Rounder)

This is the drive I've installed more than any other in the past two years. It's a PCIe 4.0 drive, it uses Samsung's in-house controller, and it's been rock-solid in every system I've put it in. The 2TB variant has become my default recommendation for anyone who wants a fast gaming SSD without overthinking it. It usually sits around $130, and you will never need to worry about it.

2. WD Black SN850X (The Gaming-Optimized Pick)

Western Digital built this one specifically for gaming. It has a firmware-level optimization that monitors game file access patterns and tries to pre-stage assets you might need next. In practice, this actually does help a tiny bit in massive open-world titles like Flight Sim. It trades blows with the Samsung 990 Pro, so I usually just tell people to buy whichever one is cheaper on Amazon that day.

3. Crucial T705 (The PCIe 5.0 Splurge)

If you just have to have the absolute fastest drive on the market regardless of price, this is it. It hits those absurd 14,500 MB/s speeds. But you need to know two things: it is very expensive (usually around $185+ for 2TB), and it runs insanely hot. You must use a motherboard with a good M.2 heatsink, or buy the version with the included heatsink, otherwise it will throttle and slow down anyway.

1TB vs. 2TB: Don't Go Too Small

This is the decision most people get wrong, usually by going too small.

A modern AAA title can easily occupy 100GB on its own. Call of Duty exceeds that. Flight Sim with add-ons can top 150GB. If you keep more than 8–10 games installed, a 1TB drive fills up instantly.

My honest recommendation for a new gaming build in 2026: start with a 2TB drive. The price difference between 1TB and 2TB is usually just $30–$50. That difference seems significant upfront, but trust me, it feels incredibly trivial six months later when you aren't forced to delete games every time an update drops.

What About TBW and Endurance?

TBW (Terabytes Written) is the manufacturer's rating for how much data you can write to the drive before it dies.

Please ignore this number for a gaming PC.

A typical gamer writes roughly 30–50GB per day to their SSD (game installs, save files, background cache). At that pace, a standard 2TB drive's endurance rating means it will last you roughly 66 years. The drive will massively outlast the PC you install it in. What matters more is the warranty, and all the top drives (Samsung, WD, Crucial) carry 5-year warranties anyway.

Just buy a 2TB Gen 4 drive from a brand you trust and enjoy the lightning-fast loading screens!

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