2w ago

Best SSD for Gaming 2025: PCIe 5.0 vs 4.0 vs 3.0 vs SATA vs HDD

TL;DW:

You'll want a PCIe 3.0 NVME drive at minimum for an optimal gaming experience. Anything beyond PCIe 4.0 is excessive and is a poor use of your money.
SATA SSDs are still viable but on the cusp of unplayable.
And lastly no one should game on a HDD/harddrive as the performance is beyond abysmal.

21 comments

Gatekeeping, pixel peeping, number wank. Play on hardware you can afford, don't let some guy with affiliate links tell you that you are gaming wrong.
- Watch the video instead of talking nonsense.
  This is not about specific SSDs, but a general comparison between SSD types (and some basic HDDs). It shows that some modern games actually take advantage of the increased speed, but once you're using PCIe SSDs, it basically doesn't matter if it's 3.0 or 5.0, so just get the cheapest drive you find.
  
  To save us all watching 25 minutes of algorithm-swill, which games actually take advantage?
- I got a small PCIe 4.0 nvme for my os drives but realized that except for loading screens being longer my games don't really mind living on a 2x16TB HDD RAID1 Array. It worked so well that I moved my /home to the raid1 array.
  Now I don't play many AAA fps games and some games got silly long loading times (bg3 comes to mind) but after the startup it behaved properly.
I really haven't noticed a difference between my sata/nvme installs, but I can't say I was really paying attention either.
Cusp of unplayable? I have a Linux system on a PCIe 4.0 drive and a Windows install on a SATA SSD. I wouldn't notice any difference if I wouldn't know or measure the performance difference. SATA SSDs are perfectly fine for gaming.
You'll want a PCIe 3 NVME drive at minimum
They never said that. Just said you need an SSD, preferably NVMe.
Anything beyond PCIe 4.0 is excessive and is a poor use of your money.
Gotta spend that money on something 💀
Does it make a difference beyond level loading time?
- Yes. Texture and asset streaming is affected pretty significantly by the speed of your storage. Load times are a large part of where SSDs of different classes can help, but the better your SSD performs for I/O operations, the better for overall visual performance.
- Doesn't even make a difference for that, for the most part. Most game loading is still CPU bound once you go past spinning rust.
- If the game is genuinely fun, no, it's all wank. I still use an HDD and the load times are long but not long enough to justify buying more stuff.
  
  The video even shows it makes a difference, although it only touches on that part, with no in-depth analysis. Some modern games don't work properly on HDDs and you get tons of glitches and pop-in.
  In older games it probably won't affect much more than load times though.
- The Gothic 3 community made a extensive study about stutter and optimization steps for HDD vs. SSD (no stutter) in ca. 2010ish for a game from 2006. So, generally for 3D games, yes, except if you compress textures in a trade for higher CPU usage.
  Btw, this game looks surprisingly good with the right tweaks atop the community fixes.
I wonder how the PC market compares to the PlayStation 5's speeds.
- You can achieve, and beat, PS5 read speeds on PCIe 5.0. No game will really take advantage of it though. They don't even really take advantage of it on the consoles
- I think it's a chicken-or-egg dilemma for PC gaming. Game devs don't want to lose the big market of legacy hardwares, so core gamers can't maximize their top notch PC's potentials.
  
  I wonder how the new Ratchet and Clank runs on pcs.

21 comments