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| Best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming in 2021 |
Slay those long load times with a cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 SSD.
The best PCIe 4.0 SSDs are all about getting you into your games as fast as humanly possible while also giving you the space to actually install them. The speeds of these next-gen drives are unmatched, especially with features such as DirectStorage coming to Windows 10 and Windows 11 that'll give a big boost for both productivity and gaming. If you are building yourself the ultimate gaming rig and money is no option, then a PCIe 4.0 SSD belongs in it.
If you don't have that sort of disposable income and still want a PCIe 4.0 SSD, we recommend a 1TB drive these days, simply because game sizes are increasing, meaning 256GB and 512GB SSDs just aren't cutting it anymore. Yeah, smaller drives are cheaper, but they aren't worth it since you could easily fill them so quickly.
It's better to have more storage than you need instead of constantly needing to prune your gaming library. Write performance generally improves with capacity, too, so that's another reason to go for a bigger drive.
To take advantage of these PCIe 4.0 SSDs, you'll need to have a PCIe 4.0 platform, so you're limited to AMD's Ryzen 3000-series and Ryzen 5000 processors in X570 and B550 motherboards. Intel's 500-series motherboards, along with Rocket Lake CPUs like the Core i9 11900K and Core i5 11600K. These SSDs will still work in the PCIe 3.0 platform but expect performance to take a hit due to interface limitations.
Best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming
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Read the full WD Black SN850 2TB review. |
A quick scan down this list would have you scratching your head a bit at this, as the Phison E18-powered Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus has higher quoted sequential read and write figures. And while it's true that the SN850 trails slightly in some of the synthetic benchmarks, we put more weight on the real-world tests, and here the SN850 is head and shoulders above anything else in this group test. It's the fastest at the FFXIV game load and PCMark10's full storage test, and it isn't exactly sluggish in straight throughput either—managing 5,920MB/s reads and 5,021MB/s writes in AS SSD.
It shouldn't come as much of a shock to discover that this incredible performance comes at a cost, and this drive is definitely at the pricier end of the spectrum, working out at $0.23/GB. It's also a toasty drive, hitting 77°C in operation. This shouldn't be a problem in a well-ventilated case but maybe an issue in a more cramped system. Still, if you want the fastest drive around, this is it.
Read the full WD Black SN850 1TB review.
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| Read the full WD Black SN850 1TB review. |
In testing, this performance was born out too, with the faster write performance dominating Samsung's drive in the write tests. Real-world performance didn't always tell the same story, although the differences between these top three drives can be slight. Even so, you're looking at AS SSD hitting 5,868MB/s for reads and 5,630MB/s for writes. Impressive stuff.
An important factor here is that the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is the cheapest of these second-generation drives. The performance is so close that it makes the Sabrent SSD the sensible choice if you don't need the absolute best performance around. This drive also runs cooler than the SN850, which may be a factor if you're looking for a drive for a cramped case.
Read the full Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB review.
Samsung has been the go-to brand for plenty of generations of SSD storage, so its first PCIe 4.0 offering was hotly anticipated. It managed to top the synthetic performance charts at release but didn't impress quite so much in the real-world tests and was too expensive. It has also seen its performance lead destroyed by the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus and the WD Black SN850, pushing it into third place in most tests.
That said, this is still an impressive drive, and if you don't mind spending slightly over the odds for a second-generation PCIe 4.0 drive, you'll be rewarded with a speedy chunk of storage. It's much faster than the first generation drives in every synthetic test, although the improvements in the real world can be marginal. AS SSD produced peak sequential reads of 5,495MB/s, which are great, and writes of 3,805MB/s, limited by the number of channels used in the 500GB model Samsung sent for review.
Samsung has recently released the 2TB version of this drive, which at $430 represents better value for money ($0.22/GB), and while the writes are notably better, they still lag behind the SN850 and Rocket 4 Plus. It would seem that for this generation, Samsung is content to pass the banner to Western Digital for the best SSD money can buy.
Read the full Samsung 980 Pro 500GB review.
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Read the full Samsung 980 Pro 500GB review. |
Silicon Power isn't as big a name for consumers as some of the storage behemoths here, but with pricing as good as this, it's not a brand you should ignore. Silicon Power basically took the same components as every other first-generation PCIe 4.0 manufacturer and bundled them cheaper than anyone else. Compare the specs of this drive to those of the first-gen Sabrent Rocket, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd copied and pasted them. They're essentially the same drives, apart from the price. This 2TB is $30 cheaper.
You do get slightly less for your money—there's no drive migration software to be found here, and where Sabrent has a thin copper heatsink on its drive, the US70 has a sticker. Still, there was no evidence of heat being an issue, and if you're buying a new SSD, then reinstalling Windows 10 afresh isn't a bad idea.
Performance is healthy too, and indistinguishable from other drives using the same core of the Phison E16 controller and Toshiba 96-layer TLC NAND. You're looking at sequential read and write speeds of 4,172MB/s and 3,794MB/s in AS SSD, which are both healthy for incompressible data, and well above what you'll see from even the latest PCIe 3.0 drives. Overall, this is a big, fast drive for really not much cash.
Read the full Silicon Power US70 2TB review.
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Read the full Silicon Power US70 2TB review. |
Sabrent has plenty of quality drives in its arsenal, but the Rocket 4 2TB stands out for offering a great all-around package at a reasonable price. Now we're beset with second-generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs. It's lost some of its shine, but only in the sense that it's no longer up there with the best drives around when it comes to peak synthetic throughput. In practical terms, this is still a great offering, and if your budget doesn't quite stretch to the newest drives, this is worth picking up.
Powered by the powerful combo of the Phison E16 controller and Toshiba 96-layer TLC NAND flash, this is the drive that really put Sabrent on the map for us and showed that having the right components is key to a quality SSD. The fact that you get a copy of Acronis TrueImage means that migrating to the new drive is a breeze, while the Sabrent Toolbox makes checking your SSD straightforward.
Performance is impressive, thanks to a healthy amount of overprovisioning, SLC cache, and DRAM. In testing, it managed peak sequential read and writes in AS SSD (using incompressible data) of 4,205MB/s and 3,749MB/s, which is decent for a first-gen drive. As with Sabrent's other offerings, you can also pick this up with a heatsink bundled for an extra $20—useful if your motherboard doesn't come with a heatsink for the M.2 slots.
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