You’re paying for sequential speeds which don’t matter in game
Everyone wants the best SDD for their gaming rig, and Samsung’s Pro line (like the 990 Pro) or WD’s Black series are often the default recommendations when it comes to NVMe options. In reality, for 95% of gamers, these drives provide little noticeable benefit over mid-range options.
In reality, the bottleneck in gaming isn’t down to your SSD’s raw speed; your 4K read speeds are actually so much more fundamental. When opting for a Pro drive, you’re just paying for sequential speeds that you likely never actually use.
It’s all about speed
But not the speed you think
When looking at speeds for an SSD, you’ll likely think that the higher the speed, the better, but in reality, the large «7400 MB/s» printed on the box actually refers to sequential reads. This is in relation to the speed of moving a huge single file.
However, when it comes to gaming, this sequential read doesn’t matter as much as games are made of thousands of tiny assets that all need to load separately. As a result, gaming performance relies on random 4K read speeds rather than sequential reads. This refers to how fast a drive can read small 4KB data chunks from random locations, which is crucial for not only gaming performance, but also your operating system performance, app loading, and multitasking.
In terms of real‑world random small‑block performance, modern mid-range and pro SSDs often deliver similar 4K random read speeds — typically in the tens of MB/s or hundreds of thousands of IOPS — with differences that rarely translate into meaningful load‑time improvements in games. A high-end pro series SSD, like the Samsung 990 Pro, will have 4K read speeds almost identical to a mid-range alternative such as the WD Black SN770.
