Our review configuration is clad head-to-toe in WD’s signature armour-style cooling, but it needn't have bothered. SK Hynix's Platinum P41 might just have the edge on performance, but the lead is so negligible that the less expensive SN850X is our pick of the current SSD crop.

And it's the best one out there right now. Enter, therefore, the WD Black SN850X, something of a last hurrah for Gen 4 SSDs. Your current PC almost certainly doesn’t have a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. PCIe Gen 5 is now a thing on both AMD and Intel platforms. Your gaming experience will thank you for it. While 2TB and 4TB SSDs may be pricey, if you come across a sale, don't hesitate to seize the opportunity for maximum storage capacity. With today's games taking up so much space, a 250GB SSD won't cut it anymore. Smaller drives might be more budget-friendly but suffer a noticeable drop in speed. Our recommended SSDs generally start at 1TB as a minimum. I used each SSD as the primary drive in a new Windows 11 installation to verify their performance. Each drive on this list has undergone extensive benchmarking, combining real-world game loading tests with synthetic speed evaluations to identify the ultimate SSDs for gaming. Of course, any SSD will represent a massive improvement over a traditional hard drive. It not only performs flawlessly and efficiently during gaming sessions but also excels in handling larger file transfers, making it ideal for video editing tasks as well. The WD Black SN850X is a standout choice, our top pick.

Even though support may be limited to just a handful of games at the moment, the best SSDs for gaming are versatile and offer many benefits beyond gaming. Microsoft's DirectStorage takes full advantage of cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives.

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