Why It May Be Time to Upgrade Your Gaming SSD

SSDs have become absolute must-haves for PC gaming.  Whether it’s an old SATA drive with limited speed and capacity, a mid-generation NVMe SSD, or a cutting-edge PCIe 5.0 SSD with nearly 15 Gbps data transfer speeds, they’re all a vast improvement over the classic HDDs (though those still work well for mass storage options). And while they’re all fantastic for gaming, some are better than others.

Photo: Jacob Bobo 

If you are still playing games from your old SATA drive, a PCIe SSD without a fast cache, or an SSD that’s capacity is bursting at the seams, it’s time you upgraded.

Here’s why using a modern SSD for gaming will get you the best experience.

Faster boot and load times

You’ve probably seen the various tech journalists and influencers over the years tell you that it doesn’t really make a lot of difference whether you use a latest-generation SSD or an old SATA drive. So long as you have an SSD, you’re good.

And while there is some truth to that statement, modern SSDs do offer plenty of reasons to upgrade. There’s diminishing returns when upgrading your SSD, but that doesn’t mean there are no returns to be had. We’ve come an awful long way from the SATA SSD I had in the early 2010s that could only manage a couple of hundred megabytes per second of bandwidth. The latest SSDs are truly exceptional.

Take Samsung’s latest drive, the 9100 Pro. Available in a range of capacities and with twice the on-paper performance of the previous generation 990 Pro, it’s an incredibly fast drive. And while it might not always reach those peak speed in real-world applications, it is still undeniably faster than most.

Take a look at TechPowerUp’s detailed game testing. The 9100 Pro is the fastest drive it’s ever tested across a range of games, and even when it’s not in the top spot it gets very close. Compared to a Samsung 870 QVO, there’s almost a 10 second (equivalent to 20%) difference between the two.

A cutting-edge SSD isn’t going to make your games load instantly, but it will help them load faster. Combine it with fast memory and an X3D CPU, and your games of Stellaris, Bannerlord, and Kerbal Space Program will load much faster.

SSD’s have come down in price

SSDs have come down in price a lot in recent years. You can get a 1TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4 drive for around $60 at time of writing. The 500GB version is even less at just over $40. If you need some additional space for a new game, there’s never been a better time to get it.

PCIe 4.0 is plenty fast for most people, but if you want one of the fastest drives out there, the Crucial T705 PCIe 5 SSD is available at just over $140 for a terabyte. You can even get the flagship 4TB version for under $400 now.

Fresh capacity, longer shelf life

If you haven’t replaced or upgraded your game library drive for a few years, I can guarantee it’s not quite as fast as it used to be. You can check your drive health with a tool like CrystalDiskInfo, but check how filled it is too. If it’s anything upwards of 70%, the drive probably doesn’t have all the space it needs to run at peak performance.

Upgrading to a new drive gives you a brand-new capacity to play with, and it’ll probably be more than what you’ve been working with, as you can get more storage for less these days. That gives you more headroom for installing more games, apps, and programs. Modern drives give you added longevity, too, with the latest drives offering the most robust terabyte write ratings, for years of faithful operation.

There’s a fresh warranty to give you added peace of mind, too.

Get ready for DirectStorage

DirectStorage is an API from Microsoft’s Xbox that was introduced to gaming PCs via DirectX12 a couple of years ago and promises to lower game load times to near instantaneous speeds. A few games have been released since then to take advantage of it, including Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2023) Forspoken (2023), Forza Motorsport (2023), and Horizon Forbidden West (2024). If you have a PCIe 4.0 or newer SSD, you’ll be able to enjoy these games at greater load speeds with DirectStorage in full effect.

Although DirectStorage has taken some time to proliferate, it is now available in most major game engines, so is likely to see increased use in future. The big catalyst for faster game loads on consoles was the Xbox and PlayStation systems shipping with SSDs as their default storage option.

Once PC gaming moves over to primarily faster NVMe SSDs, we might see DirectStorage really kick off, and then you’re really going to want to be ahead of the curve.