There’s never been a better time to upgrade to the best SSD for gaming. The overall price of solid state storage has fallen sharply over the last 18 months, and while we seem to have hit something of a more steady decline now, SSDs have never been better value for money. They don’t quite represent the same money vs GB value as older platter disks, but it’s well worth slotting an SSD into your gaming PC now given the bump in performance that you get from one.
While NVMe drives are dropping in price too, the best SSDs for gaming are largely SATA models. They don’t quite offer the same speeds, and therefore won’t cut load and boot times by as many seconds, but the SATA drives still represent better value for money. In 2020, that’s likely to change, but for now anyone on a budget is fine sticking with SATA. For us, the Samsung 860 EVO range remains the most reliable and well-balanced, and we’re keen on both the EVO Plus and Pro models that are now outpacing the regular 860 models. Crucial is still a solid option too, and WD’s latest SN750 NVMe drive is a blistering pick for anyone with the budget.
These are the current best SSDs for gaming, with our testing process and performance data beneath that. For a breakdown of the faster models, here are the best NVMe SSDs we’ve tested.
Best SSDs for gaming
1. Samsung 860 Evo 1TB
The best SSD for gaming, balancing price and performance
Capacity: 1TB | Interface: SATA 6Gb/p/s | Sequential IO: 550/520MB/s read/write | Random IO: 98K/90K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 300 TBW
As fast as SATA gets
Proven Samsung reliability
SATA bottlenecks
Sometimes higher prices
If there’s one company that tends to rule in the SSD market space, it’s Samsung. The 850 Evo was a long-time favorite, which remains viable even today, but the 860 Evo line has largely displaced it. Samsung currently trades blows with Crucial for our top pick, depending on capacity and current prices, but both are excellent drives with proven reliability and performance. The 1TB 860 Evo hits the sweet spot for price and performance, but the higher capacity models are also worth a look, especially as they’re relatively cheap and dropping in price as the months go by.
These are great SATA drives, so you’re unlikely to have compatibility issues here. The newer 970 Samsung drives are great, if you’re looking for an NVMe alternative, but they currently cost about 30-50% more, so you really should consider whether you want to spend that money. For cost vs performance, this 860 Evo 1TB SATA really hits the sweet spot, and it’s often reduced via Amazon or NewEgg.
(Image credit: WD)
2. WD Black SN750
The best SSD for gaming in the NVMe class
Capacity: 250GB | Interface: PCIe 8Gb/s | Sequential IO: 3,470/3,000MB/s read/write | Random IO: 515/560K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 600 TBW
Breakneck performance
Robust monitoring software
Heatsink doesn’t come standard
Western Digital has long been recognized for its role in the volatile spinning hard drive market, a space often ridiculed for the fundamental unreliability of the technology it bolsters. If we weren’t clear enough already, the WD Black SN750 is proof the company can find success outside the rickety data storage hardware of yesteryear. Though it’s not without its faults, this M.2 form factor NVMe drive is a speed demon, made faster by a Gaming Mode you can toggle on or off in the company’s integrated SSD Dashboard software.
Of course, kicking it into overdrive also means cranking up the heat which, according to Western Digital, necessitates the use of a thermal heatsink. Sold separately, the heatsink model is optional and sold at a premium, but the company claims its “passive cooling features” aid with ushering in “optimal levels of performance.” The SN750 is probably best value around the 500GB model right now.
3. Crucial MX500 1TB
The best value SSD among the SATA options
Capacity: 1000GB | Interface: SATA 6Gb/s | Sequential IO: 560/510MB/s read/write | Random IO: 95K/90K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 360 TBW
One of the fastest SATA drives
Competitive price per GB
Can’t touch NVMe performance
500GB model a bit expensive
The ideal SSD for a gaming PC strikes a perfect price/performance/reliability balance, which is more difficult than it sounds. Crucial’s MX500 is one of the few drives that really has no weak points, and with game install sizes getting larger, buying the largest SSD you can afford is becoming increasingly important. The MX500 is one of the top performing SATA drives, and perhaps more important, it’s one of the more affordable SSDs. It ends up delivering an incredible value, and the only way to get meaningfully faster results is to move to an NVMe drive.
Crucial’s random IO read and write speeds are pretty much on a par with those found in the Samsung 860 EVO model, if a little less reliable in some of our tests, and given that the models retail for similar prices, there is a good case for claiming that Crucial’s MX500 is in fact the best SSD you can get when it comes to dollar/GB value.
4. Samsung 860 Pro 1TB
The best SSD for speedy SATA performance
Capacity: 1024GB | Interface: SATA 6Gb/s | Sequential IO: 560/530MB/s read/write | Random IO: 100K/90K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 1,200 TBW
Costs as much as a SATA SSD
Performance is still good
Slows down as the drive gets full
1TB model hard to find
Do you want a fast SATA drive with the highest endurance around? If so, look no further than Samsung’s 860 Pro line. It doesn’t win every benchmark, mostly because of margin of error and the higher capacity 2TB and 4TB drives, but you can pound the drive with writes all day long without killing it. The 5-year / 1,200TB warranty translates to more than 650GB written per day, every day, for five years. I’m not even sure what you’d be doing that would require that many writes per day, probably a server workload rather than anything you’d see on a desktop PC.
Given that it’s dropped in price plenty over the past 18 months, you can easily pick up the larger models (between 2-4TB) for an almost-reasonable-amount of money. Sure, you could get an NVMe for that money, if a smaller one, but you get an awful lot of reliability with the Samsung SSDs.
5. WD Blue 2TB
For those who crave a high capacity SSD drive
Capacity: 2000GB | Interface: SATA 6Gb//s | Sequential IO: 560/530MB/s read/write | Random IO: 95K/84K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 500 TBW
Aggressive 2TB price
Good sequential performance
Weak QD1 random IO
1TB price isn’t as good
We’ve tested both the 1TB WD Blue and the 2TB version, and the 2TB model performs the same or slightly better. Performance is pretty middle of the road, and even lower on some charts, but the saving grace is the 2TB capacity at a very competitive price. This is currently the lowest cost 2TB SSD around, and runs just $0.17 per GB. 2TB is a lot of games, even with some creeping past 100GB install sizes. The only higher capacity drives cost substantially more (see the next option if that’s what you’re after).
You also lose some reliability with the WD Blue series, as it’s marketed as the company’s budget model and those savings come at a cost. It’s far from a drive that will wear itself out after a few months, and if you’re looking for a mid-term boost to your storage then you should seriously consider it.
6. Samsung 860 Evo 4TB
Mixes capacity and performance in the SATA category
Capacity: 4096GB | Interface: SATA 6Gbps | Sequential IO: 550/520MB/s read/write | Random IO: 98K/90K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 2,400 TBW
Faster than the lower capacity SSDs
Incredible endurance
Higher price per GB
SATA limitations
We’re giving the 860 Evo a second shout out in this guide, mostly to highlight the 4TB model. It’s currently the largest widely available (and still somewhat affordable) SSD around, priced at $599. Endurance is also an impressive 2,400TB, and performance is also as fast as you can get with a SATA drive. That’s thanks to the high capacity, which will almost always have some ready to go NAND available for use, avoiding periodic slowdowns.
The prices of the Samsung drives have dropped significantly over the past year, so you can pick up bigger units for almost half the price. What we’d say about this one is that it’s about as good as SATA gets, and while you’re making a big investment with a 4TB model, we’d still advise you to go for it, and perhaps dip into a quicker NVMe for booting and essential apps later in 2019 or early 2020.
Mushkin Enhanced Source 500GB
7. Mushkin Enhanced Source 500GB
An old favorite, for those shopping on a budget
Capacity: 500GB | Interface: SATA 6Gbps | Sequential IO: 560/520MB/s read/write | Random IO: 75K/81K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 3-year (unspecified)
Low cost 500GB drive
Performance is still decent
Middling overall performance
Slow sustained random writes
Mushkin just released a new Source line of SATA drives, which use 3D TLC NAND to help reach even lower prices. The 500GB model currently sells for as little as $80, and the 1TB drive goes for $159. While performance is relatively modest (the older Reactor beats the Source in several tests, including the overall metric), this is an easy upgrade for any budget system currently lacking an SSD.
Mushkin releases surprisingly reliable drives, for the price, so you’re getting an SSD that will perform for a good few years here. The manufacturer itself lists the endurance as ‘3 years’, which is a little vague, but that seems about right based on our past experiences with its drives.
(Image credit: ©Samsung)
8. Samsung 970 Evo Plus
A superb SSD for peak NVMe performance
Capacity: 500GB | Interface: PCIe 8Gb/s | Sequential IO: 3500/3200MB/s read/write | Random IO: 480K/550K IOPS read/write | Endurance: 300 TBW
Incredible sequential IO speed
96-layer V-NAND
Sequential writes slow under load
The 970 Evo Plus is Samsung’s first implementation of 96-layer V-NAND, which means a significant bump in transfer speeds that’s purely driven by the hardware itself, and not software tinkering. It’s also available at some very reasonable prices, with the 500GB model featured here regularly available around (or even below) the $100 mark. While under heavy sequential loads the transfer speeds do tend to fall off a bit, for gaming (which largely relies on random IO) it’s an absolute killer, and one of the best NVMe drives we’ve tested.
Eventually, this model will climb the list and probably take the top spot from the 860 EVO, as prices level out a bit, but for now it’s just slightly more expensive and not quite worth the bump in price for the extra performance. As games grow larger and more demanding, though, the 970 EVO Plus will become essential.
How we test SSDs
SSDs make your whole system faster and more pleasant to use. But they matter for gaming, too. A fast-loading SSD can cut dozens of seconds off the load times of big games like Battlefield 1 or MMOs like World of Warcraft. An SSD won’t normally affect framerates like your GPU or CPU, but it will make installing, booting, dying, and reloading in games a faster, smoother process.
When shopping for a good SSD for gaming, one of the most important factors is price per gigabyte. How much will you have to spend to keep a healthy library of Steam games installed, ready to be played at a moment’s notice? With some games surpassing the 50GB mark, this becomes even more critical.
To find the best gaming SSDs, we researched the SSD market, picked out the strongest contenders, and put them through their paces with a variety of benchmarking tools. We also put in the research to know what makes a great SSD great, beyond the numbers—technical stuff like types of flash memory and controllers.
SSD performance and value ranked
To test the SSDs, we use a PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU, 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, and a Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi motherboard. We use Windows 10 Pro (running the April 2018 update) installed on a Samsung 960 Evo as the boot drive, AHCI is enabled for SATA drives, and all drives are connected to the motherboard’s SATA III ports (except NVMe drives, which use the primary M.2 slot).
We use a combination of synthetic and trace benchmarks, as well as real-world file copying. This includes AS SSD, ATTO, CrystalDiskMark, IOmeter, and PCMark 8. We’ve removed SSDs that are no longer readily available from the pricing/value charts, but have included them in the performance charts for reference. The following gallery shows the full set of performance results.
As you can see in the benchmark rankings of current SATA SSDs, going from the absolute slowest SATA SSD we’ve tested to the fastest SATA SSD is about a 50 percent increase in performance. We’ve left NVMe SSDs out of the charts, because they can really skew the data, but our favorite M.2 NVMe SSDs more than double performance relative to the best SATA SSDs.
This is only when you’re really hitting the storage subsystem, of course. If you’re not running benchmarks, the real-world differences are more difficult to detect. A good hard drive meanwhile scores around 10-15 on our overall metric. Yeah, it’s that big of a jump, and you absolutely will notice the difference between any modern SSD and an HDD.
Because price and capacity are also important factors, these charts combine all three metrics to generate a different look at the drives. In terms of overall value, the Crucial MX500 takes top honors for SATA SSDs in both the US and UK markets, helping to cement its position as the best SSD for gaming. The Samsung 860 Evo 500GB is close behind, followed by the two Mushkin drives that go after the value segment.
Prices do fluctuate quite a bit over time, and we’ve used the best current prices we could find for these charts, but sales can and will change positioning. These value charts also remove drives that are no longer readily available from consideration. In general, any SSD will be a decent upgrade over a hard drive, and a drop in price can take a drive from the bottom of the list to the top.
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