Every week, I hunt through the usual online retailers for the best gaming SSD deals around and it's been a bit disappointing to see how little prices have changed over the past nine months. There are still plenty of great deals to be found, though, but it really comes down to what you want from your SSD.
If you need the fastest possible speed then you'll be paying a premium for it. On the other hand, if you want value for money, then it'll be speed that you'll have to sacrifice. Most SSDs sit somewhere in between but sometimes compromise just won't do.
And if that's the case for you, then I have just the SSDs that fit either bill—blistering performance or the most bytes for your bucks, there's an ideal pick for either choice.
Quick links
- Crucial T700 | 1 TB | 11,700 MB/s read | 9,500 MB/s write | $139.99 @ Newegg (save $12)
- Nextorage G-LE | 2 TB | 7,400 MB/s read | 6,400 MB/s write | $119.99 at Newegg (save $130)
NVMe M.2 SSDs
The very latest motherboards for AMD and Intel CPUs sport at least one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. Obviously to get the full performance benefit you need to install a PCIe 5.0 (aka Gen5) SSD but, unfortunately, the majority of them are still very expensive.
That's a little true of this Crucial T700 but at $140, it's the cheapest one I've seen in quite some time. It also happens to be an extremely fast SSD, as we discovered when we tested a preview sample of the drive.
However, it's worth noting that a Gen5 SSD won't make your games any faster and you'll not really notice much difference in how fast Windows boots, either. That's because all that raw speed is down to the interface and once you start reading/writing data from another drive or data source, the performance is going to be capped by that source's interface.
But if you're just flinging files around within the T700 itself then it'll blow your socks off with how quickly it does everything. How does copying 30 GB of data from one folder to another in just 40 seconds sound?
One other caveat to the Crucial T700, and to all Gen5 SSDs right now, is that the blistering performance makes the drive run very hot under load. That means if your motherboard doesn't have a decent heatsink for its M.2 slots, then you'll need to buy an extra cooler for it.
If you don't, it'll just bounce off thermal limits and all that mighty speed will be for naught.
Just six cents per gigabyte of storage—that's all you're paying here. You can go lower, of course, but you'll need to shell out more than $120 in total, as the lower price-per-byte drives are generally 4 TB models (and they're $200 upwards).
While 1 TB is enough storage for Windows, applications, and a bunch of games, the way the size of the latter has been growing of late means that if you're a games hoarder like me, then one terabyte just won't last very long. I only fit 2 TB SDDs to any gaming PCs I build these days.
This Nextorage model might be one of the cheapest 2 TB M.2 SSDs around at the moment but it doesn't skimp on hardware or performance. Even if you hammer it on a regular basis, it will last for many years.
Those performance figures (7,400 MB/s read and 6,400 MB/s write) are peak values, of course, and there's no DRAM cache to keep the price down. That means it won't be able to sustain a high data throughput if you try to write hundreds of GB to the drive but it's perfectly fine for PC gaming.
In fact, it's a perfectly acceptable M.2 SSD for all kinds of use scenarios, it's just that it's not the outright fastest you can buy. If that's of no concern to you, then $120 for 2 TB is one heck of a deal. Just make sure you use the promo code SEPT524925 at Newegg to get the full discount.
