I recently built a PC with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Radeon RX 9070 XT, 32GB of RAM, and an ASUS TUF Gaming B650M-E motherboard. I kept my old 1TB SATA SSD, but I'm wondering whether it is now holding the system back. In demanding games such as Escape from Tarkov, I sometimes experience stutters and freezes, and game downloads can write faster than the drive can handle. I mainly use the PC for gaming rather than video editing or AI workloads. I'm looking for roughly 1–2TB of storage and want the best-performing, reliable SSD I can reasonably buy, regardless of brand.
4 Answers
Try to prioritize a TLC-based SSD rather than choosing purely by advertised sequential speed. TLC drives are generally a better fit for sustained writes and long-term durability. Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Crucial, Patriot, PNY, Corsair, and TeamGroup all have worthwhile options, but prices and exact models vary by country.
For gaming, you probably don’t need an expensive PCIe 5.0 drive. A good PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is already extremely fast and should load games well. Consider models such as the WD Blue SN5000, WD Black SN7100, Kioxia Exceria Plus G3/G4, Patriot VP4300 Lite, or similar drives, depending on local prices.
The WD Black SN7100 is a very fast option. It can reach around 6,900 MB/s in benchmarks and would be a major upgrade over an old SATA SSD. Just make sure the drive is installed in the motherboard’s fastest M.2 slot.
Some budget 2TB models use QLC flash, which can become much slower once their cache is filled. They can still be fine for ordinary game storage, but if you frequently download large games, a reasonably priced TLC drive is the safer choice. Also check whether your motherboard has an M.2 heatsink, since keeping the drive cool helps it maintain performance.
My motherboard is the ASUS TUF Gaming B650M-E, and I’m only using the PC for games. I mainly want to avoid buying something that will slow down during large downloads.