🛑 STOP Buying Bad SSDs! 🛑 Best SSD for Gaming 2024 (PC / PS5 / XBOX / Mobile)

stop buying bad ssds let's get you the best SSD for gaming 2024 welcome back to PC Builder I'm Jason now probably one of the biggest mistakes The Gamers make is buying the wrong SSD in many cases wasting money that could go to more important components like their graphics card or a better gaming monitor this video is going to take you from zero to SSD Hero by getting you all the key information you need to know to buy the best SSD for gaming 2024 for PC PS5 and Xbox series X and S if you get value out of this video hey give it a like it makes a huge difference to 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 this video is sponsored by vipd key say goodbye to crazy expensive Windows licenses and that terrible activate Windows Watermark right now use the links in the video description head over to vipd key and get a Windows 10 or 11 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 Windows is fully licensed for a crazy low price and Windows 10 can be upgraded for free to Windows 11 and they have Microsoft Office licenses too use the links in the video description in 2024 there are three mainstream storage options for PC their traditional hard drive which uses a spinning disc and it's generally obsolete outside of specific uses like in a network attached storage device then we have the SATA s s SD which primarily comes in a 2 and 1/2 in form factor with a cable but it can be found in m.2 form factor that plugs into your motherboard's m.2 slot that brings us to the real best gaming SSD in 2024 the m.2 nvme SSD drive that 99% of you actually want to get as it's way faster than the SATA SSD or hard drive and it's priced almost the same or sometimes even better than SATA ssds pricing on nvme ssds is a fraction of what it was just a couple years ago though it has been rising up from its historic lows in 2023 and it's set to rise a little bit further in 2024 now consoles like the PS5 Xbox series X and Xbox series s will only use nvme drives and they have very specific requirements which I'm going to link down in the video description and I'll have separate recommendations for them as well at the end of the video in particular the Xbox series X and S use a proprietary expansion C design like this Western Digital black C60 while the PS5 requires the m.2 mvme drive to have its own built-in heat sink so check out our recommendations later in the video to get the right one nvme ssds come in different physical sizes speeds and storage volumes so which one should you get well let's start off with the physical size the vast majority of m.2 nvme ssds are socket 2280 because they're 22 mm wide by 80 mm in length so 2280 but they can also come in different lengths from socket 2230 22 mm wide by 30 mm in length and very popular for the handheld gaming devices all the way up to socket 22110 which again is 22 mm wide by0 mm in length again most mainstream m.2 mvme drives are 2280 so as long as you get that you'll be fine for PC gaming but what about SSD speed m.2 nvmes use the pcie interface on your PC motherboard and that interface can have a different maximum speed rating based on what generation it is the pcie generation speed refers to the r at which data can be transferred between the motherboard and a device like the m.2 nvme SSD PCI gen 3 and Gen4 ssds are the most common Generations in use today PCI gen 3 ssds can do file transfers up to six times the speed of a SATA SSD and PCI Gen 4 drives are theoretically twice as fast as PCI gen 3 though we'll discuss it doesn't necessarily translate to gaming performance pcie Gen 5 drives are on the market and they're beginning to get cheaper but are still quite ludicrously priced typically require a robust cooling heat sink and in theory have speeds doubl out of pcie Gen 4 drives note that while pcie is backwards compatible so a PCI gen 3 Drive will work in a PCI Gen 5 motherboard slot and a PCI Gen 5 drive would work in a PCI gen 3 motherboard slot they will only run at the lowest rated speed so in both those examples we'd be limited to PCI gen 3 speed in order to get the full rated speed from a faster drive like PCI gen 4 or Gen 5 both your motherboard's m.2 nvme socket needs to support it and so does your CPU note the different m.2 sockets on your motherboard might be rated for different pcie speeds and on some Intel 600 and 700 series motherboards using the m.2 nvme slot rated for PCI Gen 5 they can reduce your GPU bandwidth so double check your CPU and your motherboard specs we cover pcie speed in more detail for Intel 12 13 and 14 gen CPUs as well as ryzen 5,000 and 7,000 series CPUs in our best motherboard Series so check out those videos for more information today there are two types of nvme ssds that 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 the cheaper but slightly slower quad level cell or qlc drives write four bits of data per cell both these Drive types do slow down as the drives fill up with qlc drives slowing down a bit more than TLC drives if you're 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 for gaming and everyday usage there really isn't any important differences between the two ssds use a system called cache where they take the information that needs to be written directly to 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 cash now the slowest of these processes is called host memory buffer or hmb where the drive borrows a little bit of your system memory your RAM for this process then we have drives that have cash located on the drive itself using a single level cell storage called SLC cache for sure the fastest riding drives used an onboard Dam cache where the drive has its own version of high-speed Ram just like your PC Note these caches only come into play when we're rting to the drive not when we're reading from it so it doesn't typically 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 hmb or SLC Cash Drive will be absolutely fine but if you do a lot of wrs in a professional workflow you'll probably want to buy a drive with a dam cash one common question is whether or not your m.2 nvme drive needs a heat sync well it depends on the drive itself so check the manufacturer recommendations for PC generally most pcie gen 3 and a lot of Gen 4 drives operate just fine without heat sinks the controller chip is where a lot of the heat comes from meanwhile the actual Nan storage wants to be warmer to operate better so a lot of mvme drives use a special type of sticker to redistribute the heat away from the controller and to the actual Nan chips so don't remove it you can buy versions of many drives with a built-in heat sink already attached these are mainly for the PS5 which does require a built-in heat sink they do work in a PC but removing the built-in heat sink it might Avid the warranty so I recommend getting a non-heat sink drive for the PC many PC motherboards have their own heat sinks and some of them won't play nice with one built into the drive if using the motherboard heat sink remember to remove the plastic film cover from the heat pads and note more expensive motherboards will also have heat pads both below the drive as well as on the heat sink itself you can buy an aftermarket m.2 nvme heat sink including ones with argb on them and I'll leave some link down in the video description cooling pcie Gen 5 and vmes can be quite a task and many have huge heat sinks and even built-in fans so how much storage do you need well ssds come as small as 120 or 256 GB given that today's AAA titles now regularly require up to 100 gabyt and Beyond I strongly recommend a minimum of 500 gigabytes for your PC boot drive for Ultra budget builds and for anything mid-range or higher at least one ter if not two especially given how cheap storages become drives as large as 4 terabytes are now widely available and drives with up the 8 terabytes are on the market though they're currently a little pricey for productivity builds and especially if you do things like video editing I recommend a minimum of one tbyte and get more if you can and if you're running a higher 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 but for most regular Gamers and home users one large Drive is absolutely fine if it saves you money especially now that some 4 terabyte mvme drives are cheaper on a per terabyte basis than the one and even two terabyte models one quick note on Drive cloning if you're cloning a satad drive to an nvme drive or the other way around you may encounter some issues well I would recommend a fresh Windows install if upgrading to an nvme drive I'll link a guide on how to do a clone between SATA and NV me drives down in the video description now let's talk about pcfps performance for the best SSD for gaming in 2024 despite huge promises that Microsoft direct storage or a similar technology would revolutionize gaming but require faster ssds it just hasn't happened in fact in testing of games using direct storage type Technologies we find that while there is a huge performance difference between the old hard drives and SATA ssds there's just not really any difference between even the fastest Gen 5 nvme ssds and the old school SATA ssds even in loading times we're talking maybe a second or two difference between SATA ssds and pcie Gen 5 nvme ssds in fact in blind testing by Linus Tech tips users often identifi the PC with the SATA SSD as faster than the ones with the nvme ssds showing it's really not a perceptible difference now let's consider price to Performance for the best SSD for gaming in 2024 while prices for PC gen 3 and Gen 4 nvme drives they aren't as ridiculously cheap as they were during the 2023 SSD market crash they are still historically cheap compared to prices from just a couple years ago you can pick up a budget 500 gby mvme SSD like the Silicon power a60 for as little as $36 with a small discount jumping up to 1 tab for $60 and a further small discount jumping up to 2 terabytes for $110 4 TB drives for models that offer the size can often be the best price performance nvme ssds in 2024 so if you need that much storage consider one of those but that brings us to the PCI gen5 mvme drives which while pricing it's getting better they still have horrible price performance because they give you the same gaming experience as the cheaper drives at the time of filming the cheapest 1 TB pcie Gen 5 SSD it's about $150 again that's just one terab of space with 2 terab models starting around $250 the same price as 4 4 terab gen 3 and even Gen 4 nvme ssds so my recommendation foro the expensive drives on your next PC build and instead use that money to buy a faster graphics card buy more storage buy better Ram a better gaming monitor or literally anything else that has value to you now let's jump into some specific product recommendations everything's going to be linked down in the video description so check those out for current pricing and availability in your region and I'm going to check them regularly if something goes out of stock I'm I'm going to replace it with a similar product best gaming SSD recommendations for those of you who don't have a motherboard with either a free m.2 slot or maybe don't have any m.2 slots you're just not ready to upgrade the overall platform you just feel like you need a little bit more storage you got a couple options here the first is buying a relatively cheap SATA SSD without Dam with an SLC cache and my recommendation here pretty simple team group tforce Vulcan Z now there's two of these there's a TLC a triple level sell one and a qlc one they're the same price get the DC one but there's really not that much of a difference between the two $54 for 1 tab not a bad price if you do want to get something with Dam on it for some reason crucial mx500 continues to be my recommendation you will kind of pay through the nose for it though $87 you can actually find cheaper m.2 mvme out there with a little bit of dam for about this price and they're going to be faster so this is only for those of you in a super Niche use case finally if you have an open pcie slot on your motherboard and you can insert an add-in card like this you can actually add an m.2 nvme slot to your PC this is only going to set you back $10 $10 now use the one linked down in the video description there's a number of these that don't have enough Lanes you want one with at least four lanes per m.2 so you can see this is pcie Gen 3 by4 so this has four lanes on it this is good to go this is $10 if this had two m.2 on it I'd want to see a buy eight connector so on and so forth you get the the idea of it remember of course these connectors even the buy four ones like this will fit in the larger slots if that's all you have available before we jump into m.2 mvme recommendations let's quickly go through what if you want to add a little bit of bling to your PC you can pick up a heat sink like this it has argb on it can be controlled on the motherboard in a lot of cases I'll leave several of these link down in the video description anywhere from about 11 about to $20 or so just to add a little bit of blink let's jump in the best budget gaming SSD in 2024 look I know there's a ton of them out there I'm going to give you my three top picks I believe you should be able to find at least one of those in your Market even if you're outside of the US that's why I'm going to give you three of these the first is a silicon power a60 this is a great drive it's TLC it has a host memory buffer process to it and we put these on a lot of budget gaming PCs two thumbs up on these drive this is really all you need especially if you're at the budget level or even in the mid-range you don't want to overspend on your SSD $60 for one tab is a pretty insane value also really like the team group mp33 out there especially now that the team group mp34 has gone off the market for some reason the mp33 is a great drive this uses an SLC cache instead of a host memory buffer process on it so if this is more to your liking go with this it's just a couple bucks more typically than the Silicon power a60 similar overall performance and often can find this in other markets finally we got the Western Digital SN 580 now this one recently launched this PCI Gen 4 good draw and has higher performance in those sequential rewrites than those gen 3 drives but again that's not typical gaming performance out there so you are going to pay a little bit of a price premium in other markets out there especially ones that are tougher you can often find the older version of this the SN 570 a little bit slower but again great for gaming another good option out there all right for those of you who want to spend a little extra money and get a dam cash on your drive I think this is probably the one area of performance where you will see not in gaming but maybe in some day-to-day use maybe a couple large file transfers that you do every so often you will see a slight bump up and that is kind of nice so let's punch through these really quickly if you don't have a lot of money to spend I'd go with something like a cev crash c910 now most of these are going to be PCI Gen 4 drives they're mostly phasing out the gen3 drives that have been super cheap with dram on them in favor of the Gen 4 ones out there that they charge more money for wonder why they do that $65 though is why this is on my list I can only find a one tbyte version of it again a lot of these cheaper drives are being phased out in favor of more expensive ones right now so pick this one up if you can another great driver out there is the team group tforce carda a440 this is the graphine version now I will say you say Jason I thought we weren't supposed to get for PC one with the heat sink on it if we already have a heat sink it's okay this one is actually designed for you to choose between either using the heat sink or you can take the heat sink off it just pops off super nice on this $79 again Gen 4 it's got dram on it it's a good performer the two terab version right now it's a little more expensive and they also have a different product page don't want know why they did that $143 but I do expect this price to get a little bit better let me give you some other models out there that you might want to look for not as good performers but kind of in there and still with that Dam cache two drives that are just absolutely identical down to the controller HP fx900 Pro and the Acer Predator GM 7000 you can find these in 500 1 tbte 2 terab and even 4 terab models pretty reasonably priced and they have a pretty wide especially HB has a pretty wide Global reach out there so take a look at those what Great Value if you can snap it up and I expected this to kind of vanish but it hasn't vanished yet is a team group mp34 4 terabyte for only $225 do the math on that it's like what like5 5556 per terabyte that is an insane insane value now this is a gen 3 Drive these drives are being phased out but it's got Dam on it so it's still very Snappy even though it doesn't have the higher kind of sequential throughput on it still going to be super fast for anything you're doing and 4 terabytes that's a great price of course I just want to throw in here what about the Western Digital black SN 850x it's a great performer same with the Samsung 980 Pro but why am I not necessarily recommending these drives well the Western digil 850x right now it seems to be out of stock but I'll leave it link down in the video description it's probably one of the fastest performers out there in terms of good value something like the 980 Pro though again I want to warn you away this is not a gaming drive that's my big problem with it this is a a professional level drive for professionals out there for gamers you are wasting your money you're spending $113 per terabyte that's insane now look if these drives go on sale snap them up and I'll leave links down there so you can check out the prices right now otherwise just get something a little bit cheaper that's still a high performer let's jump to the best SSD for PS5 so this is the best nvme SSD for PS5 the requirements for the PS5 basically almost any gen four drive any Gen 4 drive with the dam cache and a heat sink is what you're looking for here I'm going to give you three different options here there's a ton of them out there though but don't spend a ton of money because they the faster ones don't really help that much let's start off with the Silicon power one terab now this is the xs70 this is a Gen 4 drive it's got Dam on it it's a great drive it's all a a great drive for PC you just can't take the heat sink off it one terabyte comes in at $79 two terabytes a little pricey right now it's closer to 15 50 so if you want to go 2 terab I might go with somebody else another great one to take a look at 1 Tab model only is the cev crass c930 1 TB again tends to be one of the cheaper drives but it's got everything that you need for PS5 finally we love the team group tforce carda a440 don't get the a440 light that is not a PS5 drive basically get the a440 because this has the dam cache on it as well it's got the graphine heat sink which you're going to clip on to it $79 or about $140 for the 2 terab model if you're looking for the bass SSD for the Xbox series X or Xbox series s basically the Xbox for whatever reason went with a proprietary design I think it was a terrible choice but that's what they went with probably one of the reasons PS5 is kind of beating the pants off them right now because you can get expansion cards for that or drives for that so much cheaper but there's basically two options here because they have to be licensed through Microsoft that's the Western Digital black one terabyte C50 that's the one you saw on the desk earlier $141 they really only come in 500 gig and one terab so this is the one Tab model for it and then Seagate recently started making them as well so Seagate storage expansion card for the Xbox series xss that's really it $136 for 1 tab let me give you the best SSD for these handheld devices so we're talking best SSD for the Lenovo Legion go best SSD for the rag stricks Ally and the best SSD for the steam deck possibly even the cloth anyone's buying it out there now here's the thing one terab versions of these smaller form fact so these are 2230 m.2 are much cheaper than the two terab versions except for one deal I have here and I'll show you in just a moment but basically they're all kind of interchangeable don't overspend on the speed it will not help the handl device let's start off silicon power ud9 Great Value $76 for one terab two terabytes not as good more like $160 we got the team group MP 44s the reason I like this one the one taby's very competitive with the Silicon power one but the 2 terab one is only 149 at least right now at the time of filming this would be the deal to get another alternative out there is the Corsair mp600 core mini pretty good price $79 for one terab remember don't overspend for these drives remember everything is linked down in the video description so check those out for current pricing and availability in your region and if you got value out of this video hey please do give it a like it really does make a huge difference to the channel and of course subscribe and click that Bell icon if you're interested in cool PC content I we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: PC Builder

Views: 73,885

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Id: DyqPQewxpU0

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024