Storage may not get the blood racing in the same way that a CPU or graphics card does, but it is an increasingly important component of any gaming system. With the next-gen consoles both looking to make the most of their PCIe SSDs, it seems only reasonable that tomorrow’s games will put a greater emphasis on storage than they currently do. And as it is, there’s a lot to be gained from moving up to speedy SSDs, from games loading quicker to day-to-day operations just not taking as long and Windows booting almost instantly.
When we’ve looked at SSDs before, you’d find this list stuffed with SATA-based drives from top-to-bottom, with potentially only one or two PCIe SSDs lurking at the high-priced extreme end. It’s now becoming increasingly hard to recommend the old school 2.5-inch SSDs, simply because there isn’t much of a pricing delta between the best NVMe SSDs and their SATA-based equivalents. When the cheapest 2.5-inch 1TB SATA SSD is only £10 less than the same capacity PCIe drive, and is four times slower, why would you consider going for the older technology? The only reason we can see is if you have an older motherboard