The best gaming SSDs aren't just the obvious PCI Express 4.0 NVMe speedsters. From external drives to internal ones, for PCs and gaming consoles, these are the top models we've tested.
Acer Predator GM7000
With blistering throughput speeds and fine benchmark results, Acer makes a splash with its Predator GM7000. The company's first PCI Express 4.0 SSD is every bit as lethal as its gaming laptop and monitor brandmates.
Full Acer Predator GM7000 Review
As today’s AAA games demand ever more computing resources, PC gamers (and sometimes even console players) are hard-pressed to upgrade their components to keep pace. They need speed; they need space. Replacing a primary solid-state drive (boot drive), adding secondary storage, or both can help keep your rig as current as possible. And on the upside: Unlike graphics cards and some other PC parts, SSDs haven’t seen shortages and skyrocketing prices.
Which SSD to buy, though, is the tricky bit. With platforms ranging from gaming consoles to laptops and desktops of different eras, there’s no one-size-fits-all gaming-SSD solution. Your choice of a gaming SSD depends largely on what kind of device you are updating, what type of (and how many) drive slots or drive bays it has, and what flavor of USB-C port it may have. The latest internal PCI Express 4.0 M.2 SSDs are touted for gaming, and drives for Sony’s PlayStation 5 are getting their share of attention, but not all PCs support PCIe 4.0, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who hasn’t yet been able to find a PS5 at a price they’re willing to pay. Fortunately, you can find good solid-state storage solutions even for less-than-current systems.
In the past year or two, we’ve seen amazing advances in raw SSD transfer speeds (as measured by the Crystal DiskMark benchmark), especially with some of the latest PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal drives. (If you’re not up on drive acronyms and abbreviations, check out our glossary of SSD terminology.) In sequential read and write testing—which measures throughput for best-case, straight-line transfers of large files—today’s read speeds can exceed and write speeds can approach 7,000 megabits per second (MBps) with PCIe 4.0 drives on an optimized PC. This is all well and good, and raw speed can help bolster both all-around and game-specific performance.
Speed is most important for a boot drive, which holds your PC’s operating system and from which games have traditionally been run. Secondary drives, whether internal or external, have tended to be slower and have higher capacity—they’re often used to hold game libraries—but you can get a fast, high-capacity secondary drive and run games from it if you have the right expansion slot and are willing to pay the price.
More important than raw throughput, however, is how quickly a drive can load games. Our testing with UL’s PCMark 10 measures the load speeds of the internal SSDs we review for three AAA games: Battlefield 5, Overwatch, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Crystal DiskMark also measures read and write speeds for 4K-block-size files (a common trait of program-level files in gaming-loading scenarios).
Our newest SSD test in our arsenal, UL’s recently introduced 3DMark Gaming Benchmark, measures installation, loading, playing, saving, and/or copying speeds for various top-tier titles including the abovementioned trio, plus The Outer Worlds and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. We’ve bolstered our test-results database by running the new benchmark on recent drives we have had in house, and will be running it on all gaming and general-purpose internal and external SSDs reviewed from now on.
People shopping for a gaming SSD generally look to internal drives using the M.2 «stick of gum» form factor. PCI Express 4.0 NVMe drives offer the fastest throughput speeds (and generally the best overall performance based on our testing), but your system may not have an M.2 slot that supports that bus type. Although PCIe 4.0 SSDs are backward-compatible with motherboards that support PCI Express 3.0, to get anything like their rated peak speeds you’ll need a motherboard and chipset that supports PCI Express 4.0. (For much more on the nuances of M.2, see our deep-dive roundup on the Best M.2 SSDs.)
Examples include a select group of desktop motherboards for AMD Ryzen processors, as well as Intel Z590-chipset boards designed for 10th Generation and 11th Generation («Rocket Lake») CPUs and Z690 boards for 12th Gen («Alder Lake») processors. The «Alder Lake» platform also supports the latest PCI Express spec, PCI Express 5.0, which effectively doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 and offers, at least theoretically, approximately double the sequential read and write speeds of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs. (The first PCIe 5.0 drives are making their way into enterprise systems at this writing, with consumer drives to follow. They aren’t a factor for gamers…yet!)
That said, there are plenty of capable M.2 SSDs supporting the older PCIe 3.0 bus that have done well in our games testing. And even if you don’t have a spare M.2 slot (or any at all), a motherboard port with the familiar SATA interface can help by hosting a secondary 2.5-inch SATA SSD, or even a hard drive, for game storage.
Another option for secondary storage is an external SSD, which can provide additional capacity for holding games. You don’t need an open M.2 slot or SATA port, just a spare USB port. Just be sure that your PC has the proper interface to fully support the drive you’re eyeing: The fastest external SSDs offer USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 connectivity, with sequential read and write speeds up to 2,000MBps.
The catch is that few computers support Gen 2×2, so you may need to add an expansion card that supports the standard. Plugged into most of today’s PCs, such a drive will default to USB 3.2 Gen 2, with peak read and write speeds of about 1,000MBps. That’s still fine; just know what you’re paying for and if you’ll be able to leverage to the full.
Many older gaming consoles rely on hard disk drives (HDDs) for internal storage, but in recent years spinning platter drives have been replaced by solid-state devices, with external SSDs the only option for secondary storage. The Sony PlayStation 5 not only has a built-in SSD but an expansion slot to accommodate a second M.2 SSD.
Sony has released requirements for compatible drives, and manufacturers have been quick to introduce SSDs that meet them. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to install a compatible drive in your PS5.
Depending on the age of your rig and what slots you have available, a solid-state drive with the older Serial ATA (SATA) interface and 2.5-inch hard-drive-style design may be a sensible option. SATA SSDs’ throughput can’t hope to compare with those of PCI Express devices, but the best SATA drives do relatively well in game loading and 4K read/write testing. Their advantages are a low price and (often) relatively high capacity.
And don’t count out platter drives just yet. Although this roundup is devoted to SSDs, which easily outstrip lumbering hard drives in overall speed and game-loading performance, platter-based drives still have a role in gaming. Because of their often enormous capacities and relatively low cost per gigabyte, hard drives can be great places to store game libraries, though as a first choice you wouldn’t want to run games from such a drive if you care about load speeds. But for cheap raw storage of loads of seldom-played or legacy games, hard drives can be great. A good external-drive example is the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub, available in 8TB and 16TB versions; internal SATA platter drives are even cheaper per gigabyte.
When it comes to SSDs, phrases like blazing fast or blistering speed may not be just metaphorical. Gaming SSDs, especially some of the latest PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives rated at 5,000MBps or more, tend to generate a lot of heat. That can lead to throttling or slowdown that can cause a performance hit and potentially reduce a drive’s lifespan. Drive makers take a variety of approaches to heat management, ranging from firmware-based solutions to designing SSDs for reduced power consumption without slowing performance.
Physical solutions include thin heat spreaders that are generally affixed to the top of M.2 SSDs with adhesive. These are primarily made from graphene, which has high thermal conductivity and can dissipate heat from across their surface area.
Also popular are more traditional heatsinks, most of which use multiple aluminum fins to increase surface area for heat dissipation. Heatsinks are often tall, making them more popular in desktops (which have room for airflow around the M.2 slots) rather than laptop PCs. Lately, drive manufacturers have been designing more-compact heatsinks to fit laptops and gaming consoles. Some drives come with stuck-on or removable heatsinks, and others may offer aftermarket heatsinks as accessories.
There’s also another, more fleeting kind of cool worth addressing. Desktop upgrader? If the rest of your rig is tricked out with cool RGB lighting effects, there’s no reason your solid-state drive shouldn’t be, too. There are a number of external and a few internal SSDs that offer their own lighting effects, usually compatible with popular RGB control software. You’ll just want to choose an M.2 slot or SATA drive bay for the drive that’s visible from outside the case. (As pictured above, you can find external USB SSDs that have tricked-out lighting, too.)
So there you have it: Our picks for best PCI Express 4.0 and 3.0 M.2 SSDs for gaming, plus a smattering of SATA options and USB externals. Whether you have a desktop, a laptop, or a PS5, and whether you’re after an attached-heatsink design or one with blinged-out RGB lighting, you don’t need a whole brand-new rig to kick up your gaming. These drives can do it.
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As a senior analyst for hardware, Tony Hoffman covers 3D printers, storage (SSDs and hard drives), and business and portable monitors. He has served in a variety of editorial capacities since joining PCMag in 2004. He is an avid amateur astronomer, photographer, traveler, and poet, and has written articles on astronomy and photography for PCMag and related publications.
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