Find the best gaming SSD to get your game on quicker than ever.
It’s almost as vital to have the best gaming SSD you can get your hands on as it is to have the best graphics card installed in your gaming rig. You most likely haven’t invested loads of money into a professional AV workstation with more CPU cores and GB of RAM than you could hope for, so you probably don’t have enough RAM to take care of all your data transfer needs. What this means is that the storage drive you plan on using, the drive that will load and unload your data, will greatly impact your experience, whether that means staring at your screen for a couple of seconds or waiting a minute or two for your data to load. Luckily, SSDs are much more reasonably priced these days so getting one with enough space is relatively cheap, giving you no excuse to not buy the best gaming SSD you can. One drawback though – you’re limited by what your motherboard is compatible with. M.2 SSDs would be the immediate recommendation, particularly for data access-intensive tasks like video editing, since they can plug right into the motherboard. With that said, though SATA SSDs are a bit outmoded in this day and age, plenty of users just don’t have newer M.2 compatible motherboards. Considering how long SATA SSDs have been around, even the least expensive ones have pushed their data transfer capacity as far as they can go. That means that even if you have to go with a SATA option instead of a M.2 SSD, the best gaming SSDs are going to give great performance for the price. Regardless of whether you’re rocking one of the best motherboards around with loads of M.2 connections or are using a SATA connection, do yourself and that best gaming PC you’ve invested so much in and buy the best gaming SSD that you can for your budget and configuration. If you’re looking for great value when building a new gaming rig, then the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro SSD is one of the best gaming SSDs you’re going to find. It has respectably-high sequential read and write speeds that hold their own against the WD Black SN750 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus. It also has outstanding durability, with an MTBF rating of 2,000,000 hours and a TBW score of up to 1280 at 2TB – the highest of the PCIe 3.0 M.2s on the list – and 160 at 256GB. It also has a 5-year warranty, so no matter the capacity you buy, it will keep hustling along, even if it’s a tad bit slower than the rest. Where it does fall short compared to the SN750 and the 970 EVO Plus – by a good bit, in fact – is its random access speeds, which are a little under half as fast, though the XPG SX8200 Pro is still more than fast enough for all but the most meticulous, BIS builders out there. It’s also crazy affordable as you move up to larger capacities, beating out the SN750 by about $100/£80/AU$140 and the 970 EVO Plus by about $160/£130/AU$240 at the 2TB capacity – great if you have a large game library and you want to move everything over to an NVMe SSD. If you’re looking for the best gaming SSD for your set up, you’re going to want to take a look at the WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD. It has excellent performance overall, with fast sequential read and write speeds, though not the fastest, and it has significantly higher random access speeds than the XPG SX 8200. It falls short of the 970 EVO Plus’s random access speeds, but not by much.
