Best SSD for PC Gaming | Best Gaming SSD 2021 (M.2 and Sata) Drives

Are you confused about which SSD to buy for

gaming

? Does it even affect performance? Does it limit your fps? What about building a new PC instead of just upgrading an old one? Well, I'm going to take all of these questions, condense them, and give you my Hello, welcome to PC Builder, I'm Jason and today we're going to demystify SSDs and give you our top five recommendations for

gaming

, the goal here at PC. builder is to take all the complicated verbiage and complex economics of the market and break it down for the average PC builder so you can get the

best

value for money now we are still a young channel so if this is the type of content If you want to support, like the video and subscribe to the channel for even more PC building content.

It really makes a big difference with that, let's get into it, so let's start by asking ourselves: do you even need a solid? state of the gaming drive as of the date of this video right now technically you don't, it won't increase the frames per second you get in your game, it will make your computer much better in terms of loading times, you won't be sitting there staring at loading screens forever, you won't have to wait forever for the system to boot, things will feel a lot snappier, so there will be all those quality of life improvements, but in terms of actual fps no you will see no difference.

Right now, between a regular mechanical hard drive and any type of solid state drive, you just won't cut it, but I wanted to highlight that the day is coming and it may come sooner than you think, when in reality you will absolutely need a hard drive. solid. State Drive to keep pace during World of Warcraft's summer for its Shadow Lands expansion said Hi everyone, we're adding a solid state drive requirement to our list of system requirements to run the game, that's because World of Warcraft has become a very large game and needs to pull all the game engine resources from the office and disk in a continuous stream so that you can continue to see what you want to see now in order to do so.

The World of Warcraft team wanted everyone to go out and improve their handling, of course there was a big fuss, but look, some people can't afford it, I get it, so they went ahead and removed it for the Shadowlands expansion, but let's leave this one alone guy. from being the canary in the coal mine in terms of gaming, this is getting closer, games are becoming more and more demanding and nvidia just launched their rtx 3000 line and talked about how they are really going to use new technology to make the the gpu, your graphics card, will actually talk directly to your system storage, your solid state controller, your hard drive instead of going through the cpu, memory and motherboard and having to go around, it will go directly.

While at first glance that makes it seem like maybe you won't need that fast storage if it's a much more direct route, I could also see game developers relying on that and putting more and more hits on performance. This is solid state storage, so let's briefly review the three different types of storage. The first one we have is, obviously, the traditional hard drive space. It is a mechanical turntable. You can hear it spinning if you listen to it. Are cheap. They're slow. They use a wired connection called

sata

6 and it goes at 600 megabytes per second, they don't come close to saturating it, so the next type of storage is what we're talking about today, which is solid state storage that uses physical chips. moving parts, physical chips instead of mechanical devices, it's three to four times faster than the fastest hard

drives

and is close to maxing out that SATA interface at 600 megabytes per second, we finally have m.2 solid state

drives

, now These plug into the motherboard, either through a dedicated uh slot on the motherboard or via a PCIe expansion card which then plugs into the motherboard.

It is important to note that these drives, especially at the budget level, can be a

sata

interface which is limited to 600 megabytes for a second or a much faster nvme interface which is many, many times faster. Ok, I've convinced you to buy a solid state drive. How much space do you really need? Well, if you are building a new machine. it wouldn't be smaller than a 500 gigabyte drive, so you'll find them around 480 or 512, but in that area I would definitely recommend looking for a terabyte of space and we'll go over specific drives in a second. However, I can decide if that meets your budget needs, if you are upgrading a computer and are going to use this as your primary boot drive or if you are going to replace a drive with this, then I would look at how many things you need. you have on your current drive and you get a drive that's at least that big, but probably twice as big, so if you have around 300 gigs of stuff on your drive and want to go bigger, I'd consider getting either one. a 500 gigabyte drive or a one terabyte drive and when I say 500 I mean around 500 because they range from 480 to about 512 gigabytes so that's what I would think about getting in terms of storage size so briefly, What separates the good SSDs from the slower ones and the not so good ones, the cheap ones, well, it mainly has to do with the quality of the storage.

I'm not going to get into tlc versus qlc, but I know there is a difference for players. you just don't care and then it also makes a big difference if the drive has dram or not, or a really good host memory buffer and hmb process now it's actually very hard for most drives to know if they have it or not Usually you have a dram, you have to look up the spec sheet, you have to find broken people, manufacturers are not good at telling you about this, that's why I'm going to give you some very specific recommendations in a second because this is a real headache, but basically gulp drives have a buffer, it's like their own memory, so they can suck in a lot of stuff and can spit it out in a much more efficient process, so I would recommend it for a system drive this it's a drive on which you're installing Windows 2 and probably even some of your favorite games.

I would make sure you have an ssd with dram. the cheaper ones, no, they don't have dram, most players, You'll probably never notice the difference unless you do big file transfers on them, uh, and then you wonder why all of a sudden it was going fast for like a millisecond and now I have dropped to speeds similar to the level of the hard drive, yes, your drive. lacks dram, that's what it's about again, it only happens during really large file transfers, so for most gamers you won't see a difference, but I'm going to recommend that for system drives we go with the drive with dram and Let's get into those recommendations.

Okay, so we're going to recommend our first unit and it's just a little bit to take some of the pressure off of you. Now it's just sort by lowest price. I don't recommend getting the lowest price sort method for your boot drive. This drive you're going to put Windows on, you want to drive with some gulp in there or a really good hmb process, I'll show you a couple of those drives in just a second, but if you're really strapped for cash, if you're just trying to squeeze a system and you need to save every last dollar.

You can go to pcpartpicker.com. I'm not endorsed by them or sponsored by them or anything, it's just a great tool to use and move forward. sort by lowest price and what I've done here, so for example, I went down here to the filters, I clicked on SSD and then I clicked on the drive size here somewhere and I just put in 400 gigabytes basically. That way I don't accidentally get rid of any of the 480 gig drives by putting in 500 and then we just sort them by price here and you can see a bunch of these drives show up and you'll see them swap around. places depending on sales and things of that nature the tc sun bow that these are all very cheap discs, they don't. they have dram, they won't be fantastic system drives, but if it's this or a hard drive, I'd go for the lower price and be happy with that.

You'll see some stuff here like the ms30 gear and think, oh look, that's it. an nvme drive, unfortunately it's not an nvme drive and let me know it's a sata drive. You can find out by reading more about it or by looking at the interface, if you see the interface, it has a little thing here. a bigger interface and then a small thing here every time you see that symmetrical interface like that instead of just one big thing and then a small thing which is a sata drive so three of them are satura and one big and one smaller than is an nvme drive.

Nvme drives are much faster. Okay, now let's do the second unit that we're going to recommend, which is a unit if you don't have an nvme interface and you don't want to go out and buy a pcie card to plug it in there. because it's another 10 or 15 on top of the cost, but you want to drive with a dram that you can use for your system drive, this is where windows will be installed, it will be snappy, it will be a good drive, I'm going to recommend the two gear group inches and a half t-force vulcan 2.5 again.

The links to these products will be in the description so you don't have to scramble and type that right now. The 500 gigabyte or one terabyte models will be fine for you, they will all have dram, they will all be drives that will be able to write at their good sustained speeds, and frankly, really fantastic drives as an alternative. For this go ahead and get the Western Digital Blue unit you will find it is also linked in the description if for some reason the T-Force is out of stock it is ok for unit number four I guess we are recommending here this for me is the The

best

NVME SSD on the market for gamers, it's not the fastest, there are much faster drives out there, but gamers don't need super fast transfer speeds, they just need enough speed to get the job done and the power of NVME M.2 silicon and It's called A60. drive, this is where I think most of you want to be right now, this is a drive, obviously you have to have an m.2 slot or you have to have a pcie card that you can plug an m.2 card into, so if the They have If you are building a particularly new machine, this is the unit I would focus on, it is 55 right now on Newegg Simile on Amazon, it is usually only available in US markets, and I will give it to people an alternative to search for who they are.

Outside the US Super quick and super easy installation. Turns out I love it because you don't have to manage any cables for this, you just plug it into the motherboard, screw in a screw and you never have to worry about running cables or is the cable connected correctly or placed correctly all that kind of nonsense, it just works and it works much better than a typical two and a half inch solid state drive a sata drive now one thing to note: it has no memory, could someone point that out. In this case it's okay because it actually has a very good implementation of what is called host memory buffer hmb.

It basically steals some system memory to have that dram buffer and it works very, very well. I have read a lot. of reviews on this one and frankly it has to be the best price for performance out there for nvme drives. Finally, I want to recommend the kingston a2000, it is a pro level sumo disc, so the speeds on this one will be quite a bit faster. and the performance will be very good, it will cost more, except as I just said, if you are not in the US market, I will recommend a different unit, the kingston a2000, from what I can tell in the UK and Australia, Europe, other markets, This is the unit that replaces the Silicon Power A60, which I just showed in terms of being one of the cheapest units on the market.

Also, what about NVME drives? Be frankly a prosumer, you're not a consumer, you're not a professional, you're kind of a prosumer in the middle level of performance, so I would highly recommend it and if you're someone who's occasionally in the US you're going to do video editing. , will do something great. file transfers and you say: ah, I need something that is a little stronger, this is also the drive that I would recommend. I recommend you check out the games, okay, finish quickly, get off the hard drives and get an SSD if you have the space. for an m.2 drive you definitely want to get an m.2 nvme drive, one of the ones I recommended, if you don't have the physical space on your motherboard go ahead and get one of the sata SSDs I recommended and if you're just scraping the bottom off the barrel looking for budget, it's okay to go with the lowest type for the lowest price, they are all pretty much the same at that price and you feel good about that, that will be enough for the video. today, if you like this type of content, take a second, give us a like, subscribe and click the bell icon that way you will receive a notificationwhen we publish more content.

Thank you very much and have a great day, talk to the next one.