If you've found yourself running out of storage for all those modern games, or you're thinking of building your own rig and haven't settled on your storage solution just yet, Cyber Monday is always a great time to pick a nice new SSD.
I have just changed my entire gaming rig and had planned to put in an extra SSD the second it arrived. If PC Gamer hardware overlord Dave didn't have an SSD lying around he could bestow upon me, I would have held out until right now to pick up that upgrade.
At just a few cents per GB, you need to pick an SSD that has quite a lot of storage for the best deals, and going a little higher is a great way of future-proofing your rig against ever-expanding games. With many recent games going all the way up to 100 GB and beyond, it helps to have a little more than you need.
Quick Links
- 1 TB SSD: Lexar NM790 | $70 @ Amazon
- 2 TB SSD: Silicon Power | $93 @ Amazon
- 4 TB SSD: Silicon Power | $190 at Amazon
Lexar NM790 1 TB SSD
You end up paying a little more per GB the lower your SDD storage size is, yet with the Lexar NM790, you are still paying less than $0.07/GB. This is a solid ratio of price to storage, and all on an SSD we love.
With a read speed of 7,400 MB/s and write speed of 6,500 MB/s, this SSD is plenty quick, loading Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers marginally less quickly than the Teamgroup Cardea A440 at a fraction of the price.
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This SSD's solid speeds are helped by great cooling and over a year after its launch, the Lexar NM790 is still one of the best M.2 SSDs for gaming. Being very budget-friendly, the controller and flash (MaxioTech MAP1602A and YMTC 232-layer LTC respectively) are a little less well-known and these are some of the only downsides of the NM790 range.
As for this specific SSD, if you're looking for a storage top-up, this is an excellent way of getting one, though if you plan on playing even the biggest releases of last year, you may benefit from something slightly more substantial.
Silicon Power UD90 2 TB SSD
At just $0.05/GB, this is about as cheap as you can get from a reliable SSD, so you have to bear in mind that it won't be the fastest you can buy in this storage range. It will be outclassed by more expensive drives but it's certainly not slow.
This Gen 4 M.2 has a maximum write speed of 5000 MB/s and read speed of 4800 MB/s which is certainly capable of any SSD required games, and the huge storage size makes it very convenient for a quick upgrade.
This is power efficient and pretty much the most affordable SSD out there, though it can run a little hot in use. None of its downsides stop it from being a great recommendation for almost any rig that runs out of storage space.
Unlike our previous choice, this SSD uses well-known parts like a flash chip from Micron and a controller from Phison. It saves a lot of money by going DRAM-less and, in gaming, these speeds should more than suffice.
Silicon Power UD90 4 TB SSD
This SSD is exactly the same as previous choice, but with double the storage size. Given the prices of the two, our 4 TB model is technically less good value for your money but it still manages to be about $0.04/GB. Why you might want to go for this over our previous choice if you can see yourself running through 2 TB of storage and don't fancy upgrading at a later date.
Thanks to the huge size, this is an SSD you pop in your machine and pretty much never think about again. You have to save your way through about 3.5 TB before you even have to think about managing your storage.
This means you can store God of War Ragnarök, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Read Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Forbidden West (some of the biggest games of all time) and still have for, say, 21 copies of Baldur's Gate 3.
Hey, there are worse ways to use over 3 TB of storage
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