That's because it uses the latest PCIe 4.0 interface, which has double the theoretical bandwidth limit of other PCIe 3.0 drives.
It can hit 7,000MB/s reads and 5,300MB/s writes in sequential transfers, which is well beyond most drives' capabilities.
The Western Digital Black SN850 makes a fashionably late entrance to the PCIe 4.0 party. And, with some games taking up well over 150GB, a 250GB SSD isn't cutting it anymore these days. Our pick of the top SSDs includes both 1TB and 500GB drives because smaller SSDs, though cheaper, lose performance. We are still testing to see how these drives work on Windows 11, but you'll see our findings over time. Each will have had a fresh Windows 10 install loaded onto it on the test rig, so we know how they will perform as your primary drive. Once you see games like GTA V load in seconds instead of minutes, there's no way you can go back.Īll the drives you see here have been tested rigorously through our own benchmarking suite, which includes real-world game loading tests and synthetic speed tests to find the very best SSD for gaming. Suddenly everything is right there at your fingertips-the frustration of long boot times will be a thing of the past. The performance difference between an SSD and a standard hard drive is pretty much night and day, and the same can be true between SATA drives and the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
