The Best SSD for Gaming in 2020

If you’re a serious gamer looking to buy a new machine or upgrade your existing rig, chances are you already have your eyes set on an SSD. But anyone who’s passionate about gaming can benefit from upgrading their traditional hard drive. An SSD provides better performance around the board, but it’s especially useful for the high demands of modern games.

And while we clearly endorse SSDs as the standard for gaming hard drives, that doesn’t mean they come cheap. As with any big purchase, you should do your due diligence before pulling out your wallet. We’ve helpfully identified ten of the best SSDs for gaming, but we’ve also created a comprehensive guide you can use to evaluate your needs and make the right decision.

Once you have your SSD sorted, you may want to gain an edge with the best gaming mouse for 2020.

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Best SSD for Gaming Buyer’s Guide

So you’ve decided you’re interested in improving your gaming experience with an SSD. That’s a step in the right direction, but finding the right choice is about more than just picking the most expensive option. It needs to be tailored to your specific needs and the components already in your computer. Below we’ll outline all the details you need to know as you shop for the best SSD for gaming.

Specs

We’ve outlined the best SSD for gaming models above, and we’ve made sure that each comes with a detailed list of the most important specs. But if looking over those numbers makes you glaze over, that’s not at all out of the ordinary. For the most part, larger numbers are better on specs, but if your computer doesn’t have the juice to get the most out of those specifications, those powerful numbers won’t do you much good. Here’s what you need to know about the most relevant specs.

Capacity

Capacity is an easy metric to understand. It details how much space is available in your hard drive to hold files, folders, and applications. So how much do you need? That’s going to largely depend on your demands, but gamers will absolutely want more storage space than more average PC owners. Let’s look at these demands in a little more detail.

Windows 10 requires a bare minimum of 16 gigabyte of storage to run, but the need to support updates means you need a generous amount of wiggle room in how much space that takes up. That’s not a huge factor in the space offered by any decent SSD, but it’s still notable, if only to compare it to the demands of gamers. Modern AAA games can be huge, and they’re likely only going to balloon in size.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey requires 46 GB of storage available. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 weighs in even heavier, with a minimum of 55 GB free space required but 112 recommended. As games increasingly move towards multiplayer modes and incorporate more persistent service models, you’ll have to make sure there’s enough space to handle updates over the course of a game’s life. Games with MMO elements like The Division 2 can easily take up a terabyte of space without even accounting for DLC.

Entry level SSDs start at 250 GB, but we’ve focused exclusively on 500 GB and 1 TB drives for our models. For most players, one of these options should be suitable. A 500 GB drive can comfortably hold a few AAA games, but in either case, you’ll likely have to swap out the games saved to your drive occasionally. Ultimately, how much space you’ll need will come down to your play styles. If you have a Steam list mostly populated by indie titles or you focus on one or two titles at a time, a 500 GB drive should comfortably suit you. If you’re committed to playing all the latest hits, you may want to opt for a 1 TB drive or higher.

You can always check your existing hard drive to see how much space your games take up. Just be sure that you adjust for the future so you don’t have to worry about running out of space as games get bigger and more bloated with post-release patches and updates. And while we’ve put our attention at mid-range 500 GB and 1 TB models, most of the lines we’ve featured offer heftier capacities for a little more money.

Interface

In its most basic form, the interface of an SSD simply refers to the cables that connect your solid state drive to your computer’s motherboard. The interface serves the important purpose of essentially ensuring that the computer’s central nervous system is connected to its long term and short term memory, but you should weigh your options carefully before deciding on the interface to use. There are two options currently on the market: SATA and PCIe, and each comes with its own distinct strengths and weaknesses.

SATA is short for Serial ATA, and it’s been around for a good long while. First introduced in 2003, the legacy of SATA brings with it some meaningful advantages. The most obvious is how prevalent it is. SATA ports are incredibly versatile, and any PC motherboard made in the last decade is nearly certain to be compatible with a SATA SSD. Whether you’re looking to make use of an external SSD for gaming or remove your internal drive, both new and aging machines should cover what you need. And while SSDs that utilize a SATA port provide slower reading and writing speeds than their PCIe counterparts across the board, that isn’t always a big issue. SATA drives are also easily generally cheaper than PCIe devices, and they tend to use less battery life.

PCIe, or PCI Express, isn’t exactly the new kid on the block. The format has been around since 2002, and most computers incorporated at least one PCIe slot for their motherboard within the next few years. But PCIe is a little more all purpose than SATA. Its primary use is connecting motherboards to graphics cards, but it’s also used for ethernet, Wi-Fi, and other purposes. That means that, depending on the year and model of your computer, a free PCIe slot simply might not be available. But if it is, a PCIe enabled SDD could be exactly what you’re looking for. While you’ll pay more for a PCIe SSD, you’ll also get significantly better performance.

How much better? SATA III (which all of our SATA-grade SSDs support) offers a theoretical transfer speed of 6 GB/s, or 750 MB/s. But due to practical limitations, this ceiling is closer to 600 MB/s. PCIe, by contrast, can offer speeds of up to 985 MB/s per lane available. With models like the Intel Optane boasting four separate lanes, that’s a dramatic boost in performance. Also keep in mind that the port demands for a PCIe ensures that they aren’t going to be an option for gaming laptops at all.

Sequential Read

When you’re looking at the sequential read speed for a solid state drive with a SATA interface, you aren’t going to notice much difference from one model to another. All SATA III drives are pushing as hard as they can against that 600 Mb/s ceiling, and the result are drives that are usually within ten or maybe 20 Mb/s of one another. Will this produce a noticeable difference for the average gamer? Most likely not.

If you’re looking at a PCIe solid state drive, you can expect a more expansive gap between sequential read speeds. Even if a PCIe offers just a single lane, you can expect it to be pushing sequential read speeds that are nearly double what you’d find in a comparable SATA III SSD for a gaming desktop. The PCIe drives that appear in our list all offer sequential read speeds in the mid-2000s or 3000s. But in practical terms, the difference a gamer will notice between a PCIe SSD and a SATA III drive are somewhat negligible. The sort of speeds you’ll get out of a PCIe device are designed more for the needs of enterprise level businesses. It’s a nice perk but hardly a necessity for almost any gamer.

That’s not to say that sequential read speed isn’t important. When your hard drive is reading sequentially, that means it’s pulling everything from the same place. Most commonly that means a concrete form of media like a video or music file. With games, it’s a little more complicated. Since there are more variables involved in how a gaming experience plays out, the amount of sequential data that needs to be processed and the amount of random data that needs to be processed can vary significantly. The more linear a game is, on average, the more important that sequential read speed is going to be.

In other words, if you have the money for an SSD that supports sequential read speeds in the thousands, go for it. You might see a difference in your loading speeds for both your games and your operating system, and you’ll be future proofing your machine. But the difference between an HDD and even the slowest SSD are sizable, while the difference between PCIe performance and SATA performance for this metric offer a greater case of diminishing returns in terms of benefits for a regular consumer.

Endurance

Many SSDs come with a five or ten year warranty from the manufacturer, and while you can fall back on these as a comfortable means of security for your drive’s life span, actually determining how long it will last you is a bit more complicated. That’s because when they’re trying to determine the potential life of a hard drive, the manufacturer uses something called TBW or terabytes written. Since they don’t incorporate the moving parts that cause more conventional hard drives to wear down, the one major factor in degradation for a solid state drive is the wear from data being written and rewritten.

If a single terabyte written seems like a lot to you, that’s because it is. SSDs are sturdy pieces of machinery that can put in a lot of work before they’re ready to retire, and even a solid state drive with a rating of 400 TBW should last you a good decade. Some on our list offer as much as 1000 TBW. It’s also worth noting that the endurance rating established for each model is a minimum rather than a maximum. Your SSD should be able to easily clear that benchmark before starting to suffer any sort of major degradation, but you may want to more carefully analyze your SSD once it passes that level. There are a number of different software platforms that can help you with that.

TBW scales to the size of a hard drive as well. A 500 GB SSD will offer double the TBW of a 256 GB SSD, while a 1 TB SSD will offer quadruple that. If you decide on a model that’s smaller or larger than the one we list, you can easily scale the endurance accordingly. And in addition to TBW, many manufacturers put other provisions in place that can help significantly extend the lifespan of an SSD. These include overprovisioning, firmware, and advanced error correction techniques, all of which make use of different techniques to improve the efficiency of your computer’s storage management.

Regardless of these complications, you shouldn’t have to fret too much over the TBW numbers for a given model. It can provide a good indication of how sturdy the drive is, but any of the options on our list should provide you with dependable performance for years to come.

Random IO

An SSD’s sequential read speed is a great number to plaster on the side of a drive’s box, and it can be a great barometer when looking at the general performance of a drive, but it’s not going to tell you the whole story by a long shot. That’s because it assumes speeds under ideal conditions. If you want to know how well an SSD is going to perform out in the wild, you want to look at the Random IO, a metric which determines how fast data that’s non-contiguous can be transferred.

Random IO is measured in IOPS, or internal operations per second, rather than in megabytes per second. There’s a reason for that. Since the sort of data random IO is transferring could be anywhere on the machine, it’s ineffective to measure how many MB is transferred in a second. So when will your SSD be making use of random IO rather than sequential reading? Quite often. It’s estimated that sequential reading constitutes about half the file transfers for a solid state drive.

That said, how much you’ll need random IO during your gaming experiences will depend somewhat on the sort of games you play. Random IO is especially important in larger and more open world games where the density of information available means that any information your computer needs to pull from it could be scattered all over the disk drive. And the need for nimble random IO becomes doubly important when you start taking procedural generation into account. Even modest looking indies like Dwarf Fortress and No Man’s Land can be sluggish with slower random IO because of the sheer bulk of information they need to compile. It’s also a common problem for more modern 4×4 games like Civilization and the Endless series.

While we’ve made sure to record both the random reading and writing speeds for each model, it’s the former that’s going to be significantly more important for gamers. Reading determines how fast the drive can draw its stored information and deliver it properly to the motherboard. In practical terms, it cuts down on loading times and can also show some boosts in performance.

Writing speed on the other hand, will be significantly less of a deal breaker to gamers, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely inconsequential.It can significantly cut down the amount of time it takes to download and install games on your SSD, and it has a big part to play in the rare instance where you’re running a game directly from a disk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I Need an SSD for Gaming?

The question of SSD or HDD for gaming is one that’s already been litigated in the minds of most dedicated gamers. There can be little doubt that a solid state drive is simply a better piece of machinery than a more traditional hard drive. You may legitimately ask yourself whether you should be looking at a SATA or a PCIe drive, but recent and significant price drops in solid state drives have ensured that they’re almost always going to be a preferable option to traditional hard drives.

There are a number of advantages here, but the most obvious one is speed. That said, what exactly a hard drive accomplishes for gamers is sometimes an issue of misunderstanding. Your hard drive isn’t going to deliver higher frame rates for your gaming experience. If you want butter smooth graphical processing without choppiness, you need to be looking at your CPU and GPU. But a good drive can cut down significantly on the load times of your game, both when you’re booting up and when you’re in the game world. Outside of gaming, a good SSD can improve the performance of your machine when multitasking in a pretty significant way.

All told, a solid state drive beats a hard drive across practically every available metric. The fact that an SSD doesn’t require any moving parts means it’s less likely to break down and that it also puts off no vibrations and no sound. The power draw on an SSD is generally a third to a half of what you’d find on a comparable hard drive, and that offers both a 30+ minute energy boost and reduces the risk of overheating.

But the most important distinctions are in terms of raw performance. Even the slowest SSD on the market will improve on the reading and writing speed of an HDD by at least 300%, and they generally tend to last significantly longer as well. And while an SSD can cost seven times as much as an HDD with comparable storage space, cheap and reliable SSDs can still be had for well under a hundred dollars.

Can I Use an SSD as an External Drive?

If you don’t want to dig into your computer’s guts to replace your existing hard drive, you’re looking for a supplementary bit of storage space, or you simply like the portability of an external drive, you can absolutely get those effects with an SSD. Just keep in mind that it will require a little extra effort, and it comes with some disadvantages.

First of all, you’re going to need to get an enclosure for the device. Single enclosures are pretty cheap, but you’ll want to make sure your enclosure matches the size of your SSD. If you really want to make the most of your options for the future, you may consider investing in a multi-bay enclosure. That said, there are a few advantages to using an SSD as an external device. The fact that they don’t have moving parts means that they’re much more resilient, so you don’t have to worry about them getting damaged as you carry them with you, and SSDs are generally much, much smaller than comparably sized traditional hard drives.

In terms of weaknesses, there are a couple big ones here. The first is that since your drive will be external, it won’t be an especially practical choice for running your OS. Second is the fact that your external drive will need to connect to your computer through a USB cable. USB is naturally going to offer slower transfer speeds than a traditional SATA cable. While you can minimize that degradation by using a USB 3.0 cord, even those only offer transfer rates of 5 Gbps as opposed to the 6 Gbps ceiling promised by SATA.

Can I use an SSD for Console Gaming?

If there’s one common complaint that PC gamers levy against the advantages of console gaming, it’s that consoles like the Playstation 4 and XBox One don’t allow the level of customization that a PC rig does. If there’s a second, it’s that they’re destined to underperform. While these instances might be true, being a console gamer doesn’t mean having to be squeezed out from the possibility of using an SSD.

An SSD can dramatically improve the load times of your favorite console games, and Microsoft and Sony have both been surprisingly open about letting gamers upgrade their hard drives. It’s a refreshing change of pace from earlier cycles where manufacturers sometimes tried to force gamers to make use of expensive proprietary options. Whether you own an XBox One or a Playstation 4, you can upgrade your storage with any 2.5″ external SSD on the market. Just keep in mind that the drive will need to be at least 256 MB in size, and it will need to be contained in an enclosure with USB 3.0 connectivity.

In terms of directly connecting your hard drive enclosure, all you need to do is connect it using one of the USB slots on your console. From there, you’ll just need to format your SSD for the console and begin transferring your games over. While both Sony and Microsoft use different processes for formatting, they’re easily accessed, and you’ll be provided with step by step instructions.

Can I Use Both an SSD and HDD Together?

There are a lot of reasons why you might consider doing a dual configuration with both an HDD and a SSD. Maybe you want to get a solid state drive but can’t justify spending one that covers all of your storage needs, or maybe you’d rather opt for a smaller version of a PCIe SDD than a larger SATA alternative. Or maybe you just have an extra HDD laying around and you don’t want to let it go to waste. As long as your motherboard has the ports, you can connect both types of drives into your computer without any real compatibility issues.

The only thing you’ll want to consider here is how you want to prioritize your data. It goes without saying that any data that gets accessed from your traditional hard drive won’t experience the boosted loading speeds that data from your SSD does. If you’re looking to put together a fierce gaming rig, you’ll want to make sure that your SSD is dedicated to storing your most resource heavy games. But you’ll also likely want to make it your primary boot disk. Running your OS on an SSD can improve your machines’ general performance across the board. That will allow your HDD to serve in a sensible background role as a mass storage mule.

Do I Need to Take Software Into Consideration?

Many of the SSDs on our list come with free and proprietary software that makes it easy to manage and tweak your drive’s performance. But while you can be assured that software from the manufacturer is guaranteed to work well with your hardware, it doesn’t need to be a make or break point when considering what SSD you want. There are a number of free or cheap software platforms that can replace or even complement these proprietary platforms.

A lack of space tends to be one of the biggest issues with SSDs, but there’s fortunately a decent amount of software solutions that allow you to maximize your storage limitations. Free services like CCleaner are great for tidying up unnecessary clutter, while speed boosters like SSD Boost Manager allow you to link two separate hard drives and automate the process of transferring over software when needed. It’s a sensible solution if your SSD won’t fit all the games you want, and it’s almost a necessity if you plan on using an HDD as a backup drive for your machine. Then there’s optimization programs like SSD Life and Tweak-SSD that provide deeper configurations and let you accurately track the lifespan of your SSD.

Will software be a necessity for everyone? Probably not, but you don’t need to fret over whether or not the SSD you buy comes with a software platform from the manufacturer.

Final Thoughts

An SSD isn’t the most important piece of hardware for a gaming rig, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve some consideration. Any SSD is going to provide you with a satisfying boost in performance over an HDD, and recent price drops have made a SATI option more affordable than ever before. Just keep in mind that the right SSD is one that meets your specific needs and is balanced against the other hardware components in your machine.

An SSD that has far too much space than you’ll ever need or runs at speeds that your CPU can’t keep up with is almost as bad as one that underperforms, so take your circumstances into careful consideration. And if you’re looking at building your own gaming rig, be sure to check out our guides to the best gaming CPUs and the best gaming processors for the year.

You may also like our article on the best gaming desks.