The price of solid-state drives (SSDs) has continued to fall in recent years, and it's now easier (and more affordable) than ever to upgrade your gaming PC with faster load times and more responsive gameplay. Thanks to these savings, it's possible to buy an SSD for not only storing and running the main operating system but also apps and games. Here are our favorite picks for the best SSDs for gaming.

Our picks for the top SSDs for gaming in 2024

The Western Digital Black SN850X is a serious SSD for gaming. It's not quite as fast as some of the more expensive NVMe drives such as the Samsung 990 Pro, but it'll easily load even more demanding games in a matter of seconds. This is an M.2 NVMe drive and as such requires a slot on the motherboard. Most of the best motherboards released today will have one or more M.2 SSD slots. It's capable of running at PCIe 4.0 speeds.

Because games have grown in size to 100GB (if not more), the WD Black SN850X is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. The latter would allow for the storing of 40 100GB games on the same drive, making it possible to store your entire Steam (or another favorite store) library on the WD Black SN850X. Transfer rates can hit speeds of up to 7,300 MB/s for reading data and 6,300 MB/s for writing data. This makes the SSD one of the best for installing and running PC games.

This may be our "runner-up" recommendation for the best SSD for gaming, but don't let that fool you into believing the Samsung 990 Pro isn't worth the asking price. This is about as fast as we're going to see with PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs and Samsung is pushing its 990 Pro drives to their limits. Samsung even includes a heatsink with these drives, though many motherboards have integrated spreaders on top of M.2 slots.

The Samsung 990 Pro is capable of hitting speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s for reading and writing data, respectively. That's considerably faster than even our top recommendation. To put these speeds into perspective, a SATA drive (be it an SSD or HDD) can only achieve up to 560MB/s. Should you be making the switch from a 3.5-inch mechanical drive, you'll notice a massive difference. It's seriously expensive and isn't available in sizes above 2TB, but is well worth it if you truly require such ridiculous transfer speeds.

Not everyone has multiple hundreds to blow on a single SSD for playing games, which is where the Western Digital Blue SN580 comes into play. It's cheaper than both the Samsung 990 Pro and WD Black SN850X, but isn't slow by any standard. Costing less than $40 for the smallest drive at 250GB, it's possible to go all the way up to 2TB to allow the storing of 20 100GB games. It's not the largest but does cost slightly less per GB.

The WD Blue SN580 is capable of hitting read speeds of 4,150 MB/s for loading games. There are some notable features included with the Western Digital Blue SN580 that further sweeten the deal, including a five-year warranty.

What if your motherboard doesn't have a spare M.2 slot, or you prefer not to spend more than $80 on the smallest drive available? We'd recommend a 2.5-inch SATA SSD such as the Samsung 870 EVO. It's affordable, starting at $60 for the smallest drive, yet is rated for transfer speeds of up to 550 MB/s. Capacities include 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, making it possible to upgrade the storage on your desktop for a more reasonable price without sacrificing available space.

It's not only fast (in SATA terms) but Samsung also made these drives durable. SSDs have a finite write limit, but you'll be able to load approximately 300TB of data on the 500GB Samsung 870 EVO before you start to encounter issues. There's also a considerable warranty attached to each drive, further providing peace of mind.

Sometimes you don't need the fastest SSDs available but instead want the choice between some capacities and save money in the process. That's where the TeamGroup Vulcan Z SA3 comes into play with capacities ranging between 240GB to 2TB. With read and write speeds clocking in at 550 MB/s and 500 MB/s, respectively, and while this is nowhere near what NVMe drives are capable of, it's good enough for gaming. If you're moving up from mechanical drives, this will be a solid upgrade.

It's backed by TeamGroup's three-year warranty and utilizes 3D NAND for great performance at a reasonable price.

If you value capacity above all else, look at no other drive than the Samsung 870 QVO. The SATA SSD is available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB flavors, the latter allowing the storage of up to 80 100GB games. It's designed for heavy storage, making it ideal for loading up a huge library of PC games. The drives are also fast and can reach up to 560 MB/s. They won't beat M.2 NVMe drives, but it's still more than enough for speedy load times in most titles.

It's not quite as good as EVO and other Samsung drives due to the technology used for storing data, but the speeds and pricing counter this switch. It's what allows Samsung to offer the capacities at such affordable prices, as well as the impressive 8TB version.

The WD Black P40 SSD is a portable drive that doesn't need to be installed inside a PC case. The internal M.2 drive is cased inside a protective shell and connected through USB. Not only can you use it with a console, but also a desktop or laptop PC. Because of this, an external drive such as the WD Black P40 won't be as fast as other internal NVMe drives, but these are still capable of hitting up to 2,000 MB/s.

How fast the drive will perform will be largely determined by the speed of the USB port the drive will be connected to. Whether you're into backing up data and your games or transferring the same library between machines, the WD Black P40 SSD would be a good choice.

After the very latest and greatest SSD on the market? If you have a motherboard with PCIe 5.0 lanes for its M.2 slots, you can buy the Crucial T700. This drive is blazing fast with speeds clocking in at 11,700 MB/s for reading data and 9,500 MB/s for writing it. In our testing, we found the drive to be even faster with read and write speeds hitting more than 12,000 MB/s and 11,000 MB/s, respectively.

Crucial, being part of Micron, can utilize the company's 232-layer TLC NAND3, which has a maximum speed of 2.4GB/s. The Crucial T700 is available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. If you do plan to use a PCIe 5.0 drive such as this, we would recommend configuring your PC case with as many fans as possible as these SSDs can produce some serious heat under load. We saw temperatures hit just shy of 90 degrees Celcius but it's a tradeoff for such high levels of performance.

Choosing the best SSD for gaming

The WD Black SN850X is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, making it one of the fastest drives on the market, not taking into account newer PCIe 5.0 hardware. It's not the most expensive family of drives either, making it better suited to storing data such as PC games. But if you don't want to spend that much on an SSD, we'd recommend looking at the Crucial P5 Plus. It's still a PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive but isn't as fast as our top recommendations.

We're not including any PCIe 5.0 drives just yet as the costs far outweigh the returns most people would be able to enjoy on a standard system. Expect to see some added in future revisions of our recommendations here.