How to Choose the Best SSD Card | Best Buying Guideline

Among the key components in any PC, the storage drive is slowest: transferring bits in a fraction of the time your CPU and GPU take to process it or your RAM takes to load it.

A poor-performing storage drive often leads to a big bottleneck, forcing your processor (even if it's one of the best CPUs for Gaming) to waste clock cycles, waiting for data to crunch.

Upgrade your PC's storage with the best SSD you can afford and you'll rarely regret it. As one of the four key components inside your computer, a better SSD is one of the most significant upgrades you can make to improve your PCs performance.

Which SSDs are the best ones for your needs and budget though? Between the SATA SSDs and M.2 NVMe SSDs, there are plenty of options out there for you to choose from, and it can be hard to tell where to spend your money.

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How to Choose the Best SSD

Fortunately, we've put the best SSDs on the market to the test in order to help you find the right one for your needs and budget, whether you're looking for the best gaming SSD or just the best cheap SSD to give your system a bit of a boost for a modest investment.

Finding the best SSD or solid-state drive for your specific system and needs is key if you want the best gaming PC or laptop, or even if you just want a snappy productivity machine. To find the best SSDs for gaming and productivity, we test dozens of drives each year and highlight the best ones here. We've also added in a best SSD for NAS category.

The latest NVMe SSDs have undercut mainstream drives on the slower SATA interface (which was originally designed for hard drives), but we shouldn't expect to see the end of SATA drives in the near future.

Companies are still doing new things with SATA, like Team Group's cavernous 15.3 TB drive. Existing SATA drives will have to continue to get more affordable in order to at least compete on price, but they can't hope to keep up with newer NVMe drives on performance.

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Picking the Best SSD for You

It’s important to check if your setup is properly equipped to handle an SSD. Otherwise, you might not be able to use it to its full potential. If you only have a SATA III port available, it’s capable of running a solid-state drive, but it’s a bit of a disadvantage to you.

Running an SSD through a SATA III port actually creates a bottleneck effect and holds the drive back from its full performance.

Blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs, which offer up to double the sequential speeds of the older PCIe 3.0 standard, have become common with Intel and AMD's current platforms both supporting them.

In a desktop, you'll need either an X570 motherboard or B550 board on the AMD side, or a Z690 motherboard from Intel.
You’ll want to check if you have a free PCIe connection that slots into the motherboard, letting the solid state drive reach its full performance power.

If you have those slots occupied by graphics cards or sound cards, though, you may not want to free up space for an SSD.
If your desktop system can handle a PCIe 4.0 drive and you can pay a little extra for it, they're the best SSDs for gaming. For example, the SK hynix P41, our current choice for best SSD overall, is rated for 7,000 MBps reads, 6,500 MBps writes and 1.4 / 1.3 million IOPS.

That means less time waiting for game levels to load or videos to transcode. For most laptops, PCIe 3.0 drives are the best SSD choice, because they use less power.

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Conclusion

The best SSD for gaming should be in lockstep with your best PC parts. A speedy NVMe drive will feed your games to the rest of your PC so that you won't have to wait out long loading times—and it'll get even better with the upcoming Microsoft DirectStorage API (opens in new tab) Fast and reliable SSDs make your PC life so much easier, and it makes open world games like GTA 5 and Elden Ring less obtrusive to travel around in.

Believe it or not, raw speed isn't everything. In regular productivity tasks such as web browsing or light desktop work, you may not even notice the difference between a PCIe 3.0 SSD and one with a 4.0 interface.
You'll notice that our picks for the best SSDs are pretty much just 1TB drives; anything smaller than that, while cheaper, suffers a drop in speed.

And honestly, with games being so big nowadays, a 250GB SSD will fill up so much faster than you think. Anything bigger ends up being too expensive to be a practical choice unless you find a good 2TB or 4TB SSD on sale. It might be tempting to pick a large 8TB HDD on sale, but trust me, SSDs are the way to go.

Ultimately, the best SSD for you is one which provides enough capacity to hold your data at a price you can afford. Consider that a high-end, AAA game can use more than 100GB of data and Windows 11 all by itself may need 60GB.