Storage (SSD) Buying Guide
how to choose between PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 NVMe, how much capacity you actually need, and which drives are worth the money.
Choosing an SSD used to be simple: buy a fast PCIe Gen4 drive and move on. Now Gen5 drives are mainstream, capacities have grown, and prices swing constantly — but the core decision is still straightforward once you cut through the marketing numbers.
Game installs routinely exceed 100GB, and titles built around DirectStorage stream assets directly off the drive, so storage now affects load times and texture pop-in, not just how much you can install. Here's what actually matters when you're picking one.
Best SSD for...
#1 BEST VALUE (1TB)
Kingston NV3 1TB ~$155
PCIe Gen4 | ~6,000 MB/s read | NVMe M.2
The lowest price among reliable NVMe drives at this capacity. If you want a bit more headroom, the Crucial P310 1TB (~$175) reaches 7,100 MB/s — right around the practical ceiling where gaming load times stop improving.
#2 BEST 2TB (SWEET SPOT)
Samsung 990 Pro 2TB ~$180–220
PCIe Gen4 | ~7,450 MB/s read | NVMe M.2
2TB is the capacity sweet spot for a modern game library in 2026. The 990 Pro consistently tops Gen4 benchmarks for sustained performance and thermals without needing Gen5 pricing.
#3 BEST GEN5 VALUE
Crucial T700 2TB (w/ heatsink) ~$235
PCIe Gen5 | ~12,000+ MB/s read | NVMe M.2
If you specifically want Gen5 throughput, this is the pick — it delivers Gen5 speeds at 2TB for less than most 1TB Gen5 drives cost. Only worth it if you also do content creation or large file transfers alongside gaming.
Gen4 vs Gen5: What Actually Matters for Gaming
Gen5 drives move data roughly twice as fast on paper, but multiple independent benchmarks show game load-time differences of under one second between a 7,300 MB/s Gen4 drive and a 12,000+ MB/s Gen5 drive. Gaming loads are bursty random reads scattered across the drive — not the long sequential streams that Gen5's headline numbers measure.
Gen5 also runs hotter and needs a heatsink to avoid throttling, and commands a real price premium over Gen4. For a gaming-only build, Gen4 remains the rational choice — put the money you'd spend on Gen5 toward the GPU or RAM instead, where it actually shows up in frame rates.
How Much Capacity Do You Need?
• 1TB — the practical floor for a new gaming build in 2026. Fine if you keep a modest, rotating library, but you'll be uninstalling games regularly.
• 2TB — the safer baseline and current sweet spot. Covers a real AAA library without constant cleanup, and is what we recommend for nearly every build on this site.
• 4TB — worth it if you keep many large titles installed simultaneously, or do content creation alongside gaming.
PCIe Generation Reference
Interface | Seq. Read Speed | Best For | Needs Heatsink? |
SATA SSD | ~550 MB/s | Cheap secondary storage | No |
PCIe Gen3 NVMe | ~3,500 MB/s | Budget secondary drive | No |
PCIe Gen4 NVMe | ~7,000–7,450 MB/s | Primary gaming drive | Optional |
PCIe Gen5 NVMe | ~12,000–14,900 MB/s | Content creation, AI, pro work | Yes |
Buying Checklist
• Reserve your motherboard's fastest M.2 slot (usually the one wired directly to the CPU) for your primary drive — check your manual before installing.
• NVMe over SATA for any primary drive — SATA SSDs cap around 550 MB/s and the price gap to budget NVMe has narrowed enough that SATA rarely makes sense except as cheap secondary storage.
• Check TBW (Terabytes Written) if you write heavily to the drive daily — most gaming workloads (20–40GB/day of installs and saves) won't come close to exhausting a modern drive's rated endurance within its warranty period.
• Don't run your OS drive above 85–90% full — a nearly-full SSD can cause stutter that's easy to mistake for a CPU or GPU problem.
FAQ
Is PCIe Gen5 worth the extra cost for gaming?
Can I use a SATA SSD as my only drive in a new build?
Do I need a heatsink for my SSD?
