🛑 STOP Buying Bad SSDs! 🛑 Best SSD for Gaming 2023 (PC / PS5 / XBOX)

stop buying bad ssds let's get you the best SSD for gaming 2023. hi welcome back to PC Builder I'm Jason now a big mistake many PC Gamers make is by bad ssds wasting money they can go into more important components like their graphics card so today we're fixing it once and for all to get you the best SSD for gaming 2023 for both PC and console we'll go through everything that you need to know and we'll make specific product recommendations for every budget level remember if you get value out of this video give it a like because it really helps out the channel and of course subscribe click that Bell icon that way you get notified when we release cool content with that let's jump into it before that this video is sponsored by VIP SCD key say goodbye to crazy expensive Windows 10 licenses and that terrible activate Windows 10 Watermark right now use the links in the video description head over to VIP STD key and get a Windows 10 home or Pro OEM license for a great price pick your product license then use the PC Builder discount code pc25 for an additional 25 off go to the activation settings on your PC put in the code and boom you have a fully licensed Windows 10 for a crazy low price which can be upgraded for free to Windows 11. use the links in the video description below technically there are three storage options for PC the first is the traditional spinning hard drive using a SATA data cable the second is the SATA SSD which primarily comes in a two and a half inch form factor like this with a cable but can also be found in an m.2 form factor that plugs into your motherboard's m.2 slot and finally there's the m.2 nvme SSD the nvme just stands for non-volatile Memory Express which exclusively uses the m.2 form factor and the much faster nvme protocol in the last two years the price of nvme SSD storage has absolutely crashed to the point that I no longer see a role for the traditional hard drive in a personal PC build even for bulk storage in fact nvme ssds are now cheaper than SATA ssds even though they're faster mostly because SATA ssds are being replaced by the newer nvme ones though if you have an older PC or if you run out of m.2 slots on your PC they might still be a viable option note that you can also buy an add-on card for modern PCS to add more m.2 slots consoles like the PS5 Xbox series X and Xbox series s will only use nvme drives and they have very specific requirements which I'll link down in the video description and I'll have separate recommendations for them as well m.2 drives an m.2 nvmes come in different physical sizes speeds and storage volumes so which one should you get well let's start with the physical size the vast majority of m.2 nvme ssds today are socket 2280 because they're 22 millimeters wide by 80 millimeters in length so 2280 but they can also come in different lengths from socket 2230 22 millimeters wide by 30 millimeters in length hence 2230 all the way up to socket 22 110 which is again 22 millimeters wide by 110 millimeters in length again most mainstream m.2 nvmes are socket 2280 so as long as you get that you'll be fine now let's talk about speed m.2 and Vietnamese use the pcie interface on your motherboard and that interface can have a different maximum speed rating based on what generation it is the pcie generation speeds refer to the rate at which data can be transferred between the motherboard and a device like an m.2 nvme SSD pcie gen 3 ssds are the most common generation in use today and they've seen their prices absolutely crash to below that of SATA ssds and they can be up to six times as fast as those SATA ssds pcie Gen 4 ssds have also Fallen greatly in price and can be up to twice as fast as a pcie gen 3 Drive note I'm saying up to double because that's the maximum bandwidth of pcie Gen 4 but it doesn't mean that a specific pcie Gen 4 Drive will run at that full speed pcie Gen 5 drives have just hit the market they're still crazy expensive typically require a robust Cooling heatsink and in theory have speeds up up to double that of pcie Gen 4 drives pcie is backwards compatible so a PCI gen 3 Drive will work on a PCI Gen 5 by the board slot and a PCI Gen 5 drive would work in a PCI gen 3 motherboard slot though they will only run at the lowest rated speed so in both those examples we would be limited to PCI gen 3 speed also note that while every modern CPU and motherboard m.2 slot will support PCI gen 3 if you want to use a faster pcie Gen 4 or 5 drive then your motherboard and CPU need to also support that speeder faster otherwise the drive will run at the lower rated speed for instance ryzen 5000 CPUs will only support up to PCI Gen 4 on a 500 series motherboard m.2 slot that are rated for PCI Gen4 so while a Gen 5 nvme SSD would work it would only run at the lower rated speed for more information on specific CPUs and motherboard chipset support for pcie speeds above gen 3. check out our motherboard buying guys for ryzen and Intel motherboards on our how to build a PC playlist linked down in the video description today two types of nvme ssds are most common based on how much data they can store per unit of memory triple level cell or TLC drives can store three bits of data per cell while cheaper but slightly slower quad level cell or qlc drives right four bits of data per cell both these drives do slow down as they fill up with qlc Drive slowing down a little bit more than TLC drives if you are mostly gaming then you can expect both TLC and qlc drives to last long past their warranty periods possibly up to 10 years or even longer under that use case scenario let's talk about Drive caching ssds use a system called Cash where they take the info that needs to be written directly onto the drive and they temporarily store it on a limited size but much faster temporary memory that allows you to speed up the writing process as long as the file size does not exceed the size of the cache the slowest of these process is called host memory buffer or hmb where the drive actually borrows a little bit of your system memory your RAM for this process then we have drives that have cache located on the drive itself using single level cell storage called SLC cache for short the fastest riding drives use an onboard dram cache where the drive has its own version of high-speed Ram just like your PC note that these caches only come into play when we're writing to the drive not when reading from it so it doesn't really impact gaming at all and when we try to write very large files that exceed the size of the cache the drive will slow down for most users a modern HMV or SLC Cash Drive will be fine but if you do a lot of Rights in a professional workflow you will want to buy a drive with a dram cache so how much storage do you need well ssds come as small as 120 or even 256 gigabytes given that today's AAA games now regularly require up to 100 gigabytes and Beyond I strongly recommend a minimum of 500 gigabytes for your boot drive for old for Budget builds and for anything mid-range or higher at least one terabyte if not two especially given how cheap storage has become drives as large as four terabytes are now widely available and drives with up to eight terabytes are on the market though they're currently a little bit pricey for productivity builds and especially if you do things like video editing I recommend a minimum of one terabyte and get more if you can and if you are running a high level professional production process you may want to get multiple drives one for the system boot one for your video editing scratch drive and one for longer term video storage one quick note on Drive cloning if you are cloning a SATA drive to an nvme or the other way around you may encounter some issues while I would recommend a fresh Windows install if you're upgrading your boot drive to an nvme drive I'll link a guide on how to do a clone between SATA and nvme drives down in the video description now let's talk about performance and the best SSD for gaming 2023 for many years we've heard how Microsoft direct storage would be used in in upcoming games to load assets directly from the SSD into your GPU bypassing the CPU as a potential bottleneck and greatly increasing FPS while decreasing loading times finally in January 2023 we got forespoken the very first PC game released using Microsoft direct storage in benchmarks done by Tech testers I'll leave a link to their full video below and they're a great channel for SSD and other testing if you want to subscribe to them they found virtually no FPS difference between stata ssds PCI gen 3 ssds and PCI Gen4 ssds and even a hard disk drive at most the fastest drives were only about 4 FPS faster using an RTX 4090 or about five percent faster than using a hard disk drive but what about loading times surely there has to be a huge increase there right wrong multiple Outlets tested the game and found that as long as you had any SSD even a SATA one loading times within a couple seconds of each other honestly an imperceptible difference to human beings though they were a huge Improvement went over the hard disk loading times of course this is only the very first direct storage title and future ones could see more Improvement but in a blind gaming test done by Linus Tech tips the difference was so negligible that several the participants mistakenly thought they SATA SSD PC felt faster than the PC with a pcie 4.0 nvme SSD so for price to Performance what's the best SSD for gaming 2023 well right now prices for PCI gen 3 and Gen 4 nvme drives are incredibly cheap which drives as low as 25 dollars for 500 gigabytes forty dollars for one terabyte or current price sweet spot of 75 for two terabytes four terabyte drives are a little more expensive per unit of storage starting around 200 and 8 terabyte nvme drive start at around 900 a lot more expensive on a per terabyte basis but they are quickly coming down in price in fact the big price difference between the drives has more to do with their overall quality like the controller whether it has a dram cache and other features but pcie gen five drives mostly sold out right now are going for about three hundred and fifty dollars and up for a two terabyte model so almost four times as much and remember we'll need a CPU and motherboard that support PCI Gen 5 devices to run them given there isn't really any performance difference you're spending nearly four times as much for absolutely no additional gaming performance so my recommendation is to spend that money buying a faster GPU a faster CPU faster Ram or even just a larger nvme SSD let's jump into some specific product recommendations all the links to these products will be down in the video description below I will check them regularly and if something goes out of stock I'll replace it with a similar product let's start off with some Santa Drives we'll just quickly punch through these again recommend nvme drive but for some reason you just have an old PC all of your m.2 slots have been completely used up and for some reason you don't want to buy an add-in card which we'll show you in just a second you can still get some SATA drives all of the prices are slight slightly higher than nvme drives now if you don't need a dram cache if you just want like kind of bulk storage for your system or you just want something to upgrade your hard drive to look at like the Silicon power one terabyte SSD these do come in various sizes 36 dollars right now for a one terabyte size you can also look at something like the team group t-force Vulcan these drives are essentially identical they both use an SLC cache on them both use TLC in terms of the right on them you're only going to get SATA level SSD performance but as we've seen even in gaming not huge differences but they do cost a little bit more now than nvme drives if for some reason you decide you also want an actual dram cache to kind of speed up the right process The crucial mx500 one terabyte also comes in two terabyte drives but for one terabyte 51 it's not the terrible price right now if for some reason you need to go SATA let's talk about add-in cards really quick especially for systems that either don't have an m.2 slot or have all of theirs full you can get an add-in card like this it goes into the PCI slot it just goes and screws in now you just want to make sure well we talked about speed before three four five all these drives generally use four pcie lanes regardless of the speed so you want to make sure to get at least a buy for adapter that's how many lanes are down here per m.2 so if you get a dual one you want it to be at least by eight I would just recommend just keep it simple get the ones that I've listed down in the video description and if you want to add a little fun to your build a little bling you can buy RGB actually argb drive heatsink covers that just look super cool in your build these will actually plug into your either an argb controller or they're plugged directly into your motherboard and you can control the RGB on them they come in a number of you know various shapes and sizes and kind of lighting configuration so I'll leave some link down in the video description if you want to think about bling out your build for about 15 each all right let's get to our best SSD for gaming 2023 recommendations let's start at the budget level I honestly up to the mid-range again we're not seeing a lot of performance difference in these drives and the host memory buffer processes on a lot of these drives these are drama drives that's why they're so cheap have gotten so so much better and they have gotten so much faster over the last couple years let's start with the drive I recommend quite often the Silicon power one terabyte mvme m.2 now here's the thing about these drives they're more or less interchangeable I would just go ahead and buy the cheapest one that I'm recommending or that's listed currently down in the video description silicon power a60 is great one quick note see these stickers on top never remove these stickers if you do it does typically void the warranty on them the stickers themselves are actually heat spreaders to keep the man chips the actual memory warm and spread that warmth across because they actually run better when they're warm as opposed to like completely cold another great Drive is the team group mp33 this is a one terabyte version of it currently selling for 42 dollars again these drives tend to change places in terms of which one's the cheapest right now if we look at you know getting the two terabyte version of it you can see that 74 dollars so it's actually a better value to get the two terabyte version right now at least in the US than it is to get to one terabyte drives and that's what I would recommend warranty on these drives tended to be pretty good don't worry about the right life on these you will probably never reach that if you're just doing kind of regular consumer stuff and you're not just doing data center stuff other good drives to consider crucial P3 one terabyte really not much more to say about this here's a great Drive especially if you're outside of the US the Western Digital blue sn570 this is the slightly newer version than the sn550 that we used to recommend again really good host memory buffer process on it really really nice performance Drive overall and I know especially in some of those Asian and European markets you can often find this one as one of the cheapest drives here's another Drive obviously 99 for one terabyte I would not recommend this in the US market I would definitely avoid it but I know in a lot of Asian markets India as well as in the UK this tends to be one of the best priced performance drives over there so we'll just ignore the us-based price links down there should be Global links go ahead and click on it see what the pricing and availability is in your region but again often is one of the best price to Performance nvme drives out there let's talk about the best SSD for Xbox series X and Xbox series s unfortunately Microsoft's kind of has you in a little bit of a jam at least until Western Digital starts making theirs later now you can also get an external SSD as well but if you're looking for something faster the Seagate storage expansion card this is the kind of officially licensed one if you will for both Xbox series X and Xbox series s 149 for one terabyte pretty steep in my opinion this actually just goes and plugs right into the back of your Xbox series X or Xbox series s so it is really really easy to install unfortunately a little bit more expensive let me give you a couple of quick recommendations for best SSD for PS5 2023 remember to follow the guidance including they have to be a certain speed they also recommend having a heatsink on them as well and they recommend not using drives that have a host memory buffer process on them they have to have an SLC or dram cache so here's the two drives that I know work really well Western Digital little black sn850x it's 89 for one terabyte remember to get the one with the heatsink on it now there are some size limitations on the heatsinks for the PS5 because it's a small form factor and there's not really a lot of air going through that thing they definitely recommend to get the one with the heatsink on it 89 right now over at Amazon for one terabyte the other one is the Samsung 980 Pro again just another really phenomenal drive this has a dram cache on it happens to be the exact same price as the day I'm filming this sometimes they kind of flip-flop in terms of which one is cheaper either one of these is going to be absolutely amazing for your PS5 but what if you're looking for a higher performance drive and you want to spend a little bit more money you want to get something with a dram cache at the Gen 3 speed for Dram honestly right now I didn't expect it to be on super sale it is it's a silicon power a80 this is a great drive if you're looking for something that's got that dram cache on it honestly it's only about five dollars more some of the cheapest non-dramam drives or dram less drives out there I probably go ahead and pick it up it's on supercell right now but I expect it to be around fifty dollars per terabyte with a little bit of a discount when you go to that two terabytes it's about eighty dollars right now another drive that's often very competitive with it is the Samsung 970 Evo plus slightly older drive but we have used these in a couple of our video editing builds we really did like them if you apply the five dollar coupon right now it's fifty four dollars not a bad price for it usually it's a little bit cheaper than that and you do get that two terabyte discount if you want to buy two if you're looking for Gen 4 drives that also have dram on them you want super high performance the one that won't break the bank crucial P5 plus often on sale 70 right now this is not the fastest drive though out there for sure I know it's can struggle versus some of it's more expensive competitors in sustained rights but for 70 bucks definitely won't break the bank and you do get that two terabyte discount if you're looking for the fastest kind of the fastest one of the drives that I would start with is the Western Digital black sn850x one terabyte we went over this for the PS5 you don't have to get the heatsink which is nice because it's so much cheaper without the heatsink I don't even understand why 85 it's just a chunk of metal over the top of it how can it be that expensive remember most motherboards come with their own heat sinks over the top so you can get those you'd also get aftermarket ones as well 84 for one terabyte and right now it's going for only a hundred and fifty dollars for two terabytes wow what a deal Chevrolet rocket is another really really good performer this one's a little bit more expensive 89 honestly as long as the prices are about the same I think any of these last three I gave you I'd consider interchangeable and then the final drive is a drive that we use all the time in our video editing process we have four of these in our 5950x video editing rig that's a Samsung 980 Pro these are Gen 4 ssds with the dram cache on them I'm aware that they had a firmware issue just make sure you update the firmware on the drive using the Samsung magician software two terabytes right now for 139 dollars is an insane price check out all the links down in the video description for current pricing and availability and the best SSD deals right now and if you got value out of the video please give it a like it makes a huge difference to the channel and of course subscribe and click that Bell icon that way you get notified when we release cool content speaking of cool content why don't you check out our how to build a PC guide right here we go through everything that you need to know step by step we take you through the process or check out our PC build guide playlist right here we go through all kinds of builds from the 13600k the 5600 the 7600 and more I will catch you on the next one

Channel: PC Builder

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Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2023